The Fourth Protocol

Chapter 16

Brian Harcourt-Smith listened attentively, leaning back, eyes on the ceiling, fingers toying with a slim gold pencil. “That’s it?” he asked when Preston had finished his verbal report.

“Yes,” said Preston.

“This Dr. Wynne-Evans, is he prepared to put his deductions in written form?”

“Hardly deductions, Brian. It’s a scientific analysis of the metal, coupled with its only two known uses. And yes, he has agreed to put it in the form of a written report. I’ll attach it to my own.”

“And your own deductions? Or should I say scientific analysis?”

Preston ignored the patronizing tone. “I think it inescapable that Semyonov arrived in Glasgow to deposit his tin and its contents in a dead drop or hand it over to someone he was due to meet,” he said. “Either way, that means there is an illegal here, on the ground.

I think we could try to find him.”

“A charming idea. The trouble is, we haven’t a clue where to start. Look, John, let me be frank. You leave me, as so often, in an extremely difficult position. I really do not see how I can take this matter higher unless you can provide me with a little more evidence than a single disk of rare metal taken from a lamentably dead Russian seaman.”

“It’s been identified as one half of the initiator of a nuclear device,” Preston pointed out. “It’s hardly just a bit of metal.”

“Very well. One half of what might be the trigger of what might be a device—which might have been destined for a Soviet illegal who might be resident in Britain, Believe me, John, when you submit your full report I shall, as ever, consider it with the greatest gravity.”

“And then NFA it?” asked Preston.

Harcourt-Smith’s smile was unfaltering and dangerous. “Not necessarily. Any report from you will be treated on its merits, like anyone else’s. Now I suggest you try to find for me at least some corroborative evidence to support your evident predilection for the conspiracy theory. Make that your next priority.”

“All right,” said Preston as he rose. “I’ll get right on it.”

“You do that,” said Harcourt-Smith.

When Preston had gone, the Deputy Director-General consulted a list of in-house phone numbers and called the head of Personnel.

On the following day, Wednesday, April 15, a British Midland Airways flight from Paris touched down about noon at Birmingham’s West Midlands Airport. Among the passengers was a young man with a Danish passport.

The name on the passport was also Danish, and had anyone been so curious as to address him in Danish, he would have responded fluently. He had in fact had a Danish mother, from whom he had acquired his basic grasp of the language, now honed to perfection in several language schools and on visits to Denmark.

His father, however, had been a German, and the young man, born well after the Second World War, originated from Erfurt, where he had been raised. That made him an East German. He also happened to be a staff officer in the East German SSD intelligence service.

He had no idea of the significance of his mission in Britain, nor did he care to find out.

His instructions were simple and he followed them to the letter. Passing without difficulty through customs and immigration, he hailed a cab and asked to be taken to the Midland Hotel on New Street. Throughout the journey, and during the check-in procedures, he was careful to favor his left arm, which was encased in a plaster cast. He had been warned, if warning had been necessary, that under no circumstances was he to attempt to pick up his suitcase with the “broken” arm.

Once in his room, he locked the door and went to work on the plaster cast with the tough steel cutters tucked at the bottom of his shaving kit, carefully snipping down the inside of the forearm, along the line of tiny indentations that marked the cutting path.

When the incision was complete, he prised the cast open half an inch and withdrew his arm, wrist, and hand. The empty cast he dropped into the plastic shopping bag he brought with him.

He spent the entire afternoon in his room so that the day staff at the reception desk should not see him with the cast off, and left the hotel only late at night, when a different staff was on duty.

The newspaper kiosk at New Street Station was where they had said the rendezvous would take place, and at the appointed hour a figure in black leather motorcycle clothing approached him. The muttered exchange of identification took seconds, the shopping bag changed hands, and the figure in leather was gone. Neither of them had attracted a passing glance.

At the hour of dawn, when the night staff at the hotel was still on duty, the Dane checked out, took the early train to Manchester, and flew out from that airport, where no one had ever seen him before, with or without a plaster cast. By sundown, via Hamburg, he was back in Berlin, where as a Dane he went through the Wall at Checkpoint Charlie.

His own people met him on the other side, heard his report, and spirited him away.

Courier Three had delivered.

John Preston was annoyed and not in the best of humors. The week he had arranged to take off work to be with Tommy was being ruined. Tuesday had been partly taken up with his verbal report to Harcourt-Smith, and Tommy had had to spend the day reading or watching television.

Preston had insisted on keeping their date to go to Madame Tussaud’s waxwork museum on Wednesday morning, but had come into the office in the afternoon to finish his written report. The letter from Crichton in Personnel was on his desk. He read it with something close to disbelief.

It was couched, as ever, in the friendliest terms. A glance at the files had shown that Preston was owed four weeks’ leave; he would be, of course, aware of the rules of the service; backlogging of leave was not encouraged for obvious reasons; necessity to keep all vacation time up to date, blah, blah, blah. In short, he would be required to take his accumulated leave forthwith—that is, as of the following morning.

“Bloody idiots,” he called to the office in general, “some of them couldn’t find their way to the can without a Labrador.”

He called Personnel and insisted on speaking to Crichton personally.

“Tim, it’s me, John Preston. Look, what’s this letter doing on my desk? I can’t take leave now; I’m on a case, right in the middle of it. ... Yes, I know it’s important not to backlog leave, but this case is also important, a damn sight more so, actually.”

He heard out the bureaucrat’s explanation concerning the disruption caused to the system if staffers accumulated too much vacation time, then cut in. “Look, Tim, let’s keep it short. All you have to do is call Brian Harcourt-Smith. He’ll vouch for the importance of the case I’m on. I can take the time in the summer.”

“John,” said Tim Crichton gently, “that letter was written at the express orders of Brian.”

Preston stared at the receiver for several moments. “I see,” he said finally, and put it down.

“Where are you going?” asked Bright as he headed for the door.

“To get a stiff drink,” said Preston.

It was well after the lunch hour and the bar was almost empty. The late-lunch crowd had not yet been replaced by the early-evening thirst-quenchers. There was a couple over from Charles Street having a head-to-head in one corner, so Preston took a stool at the bar. He wanted to be alone. “Whisky,” he said, “a large one.”

“Same for me,” said a voice at his elbow. “And it’s my round.”

Preston turned to see Barry Banks of K7.

“Hello, John,” said Banks, “saw you scooting down here as I was crossing the lobby.

Just wanted to say I have something for you. The Master was most grateful.”

“Oh, yes, that. Not at all.”

“I’ll bring it to your office tomorrow,” said Banks.

“Don’t bother,” said Preston angrily. “We are down here to celebrate my four weeks of leave. Beginning as of tomorrow. Enforced. Cheers.”

“Don’t knock it,” said Banks gently. “Most people can’t wait to get away from the place.” He had already noticed that Preston was nursing a grudge of some kind and intended to ease the reason for it from his MI5 colleague. What he was not able to tell Preston was that he had been asked by Sir Nigel Irvine to cultivate Harcourt-Smith’s black sheep and to report back on what he had learned.

An hour and three whiskies later, Preston was still sunk in gloom. “I’m thinking of quitting,” he said suddenly.

Banks, a good listener who interrupted only to extract information, was concerned.

“Pretty drastic,” he said. “Are things that bad?”

“Look, Barry, I don’t mind free-falling from twenty thousand feet. I don’t even mind people taking potshots at me when the chute opens. But I get bloody annoyed when the flak’s coming from my own side. Is that unreasonable?”

“Sounds perfectly justified to me,” said Banks. “So who’s shooting?”

“The whiz kid upstairs,” growled Preston. “Just put in another report he didn’t seem to like.”

“NFA’ed again?”

Preston shrugged. “It will be.”

The door opened to admit a crowd from Five. Brian Harcourt-Smith was at the center of it, several of his heads of section around him.

Preston drained his glass. “Well, I must love you and leave you. Taking my boy to the movies tonight.”

When Preston had gone, Barry Banks finished his drink, avoided an invitation to join the group at the bar, and went to his office. From there he made a long phone call to C in his office in Sentinel House.

It was not until the small hours of Thursday that Major Petrofsky arrived back at Cherryhayes Close. The black leathers and visored mask were with the BMW in their garage at Thetford. When he drove his little Ford quietly onto the hard pad in front of his garage and let himself into the house, he was in a sober suit and light raincoat. No one noticed him or the plastic shopping bag in his hand.

With the door firmly locked behind him, he went upstairs and pulled open the bottom drawer of the clothes chest. Inside was a Sony transistor radio. Beside it he laid the empty plaster cast.

He did not interfere with either item. He did not know what they contained, nor did he wish to find out. That would be for the assembler, who would not arrive to perform his task until the complete list of required components had been safely received.

Before sleeping, Petrofsky made himself a cup of tea. There were nine couriers in all.

That meant nine first rendezvous and nine backups in case of a no-show at the first meeting. He had memorized them all, plus another six that represented the three extra couriers to be used as replacements if necessary.

One of those would now have to be called on, as Courier Two had failed to show.

Petrofsky had no idea why that rendezvous had failed. Far away in Moscow, Major Volkov knew. Moscow had had a complete report from the Glasgow consul, who had assured his government that the dead seaman’s effects were locked up in Partick police station and would remain there until further notice.

Petrofsky checked his mental list. Courier Four was due in four days, and the meet was to be in the West End of London. It was dawn of the sixteenth when he slept. As he drifted off, he could hear the whine of a milk truck entering the street and the clatter of the day’s first deliveries.

This time, Banks was more open. He was waiting for Preston in the lobby of his apartment building when the MI5 man drove up on Friday afternoon with Tommy in the passenger seat.

The pair of them had been out at the Hendon Aircraft Museum, where the boy, enthused by the fighter planes of bygone ages, had announced he intended to be a pilot when he grew up. His father knew he had decided on at least six careers in the past, and would have changed his mind again before the year was out. It had been a good afternoon.

Banks seemed surprised to see the boy; he had evidently not expected his presence. He nodded and smiled, and Preston introduced him to Tommy as “someone from the office.”

“What is it this time?” asked Preston.

“A colleague of mine wants another word with you,” said Banks carefully.

“Will Monday do?” asked Preston. On Sunday his week with Tommy would be over and he would drive the boy to Mayfair to hand him over to Julia.

“Actually, he’s waiting for you now.”

“Back seat of a car again?” asked Preston.

“Er ... no. Small flat we keep in Chelsea.”

Preston sighed. “Give me the address. I’ll go, and you take Tommy up the street for an ice cream.”

“I’ll have to check,” said Banks.

He went into a nearby phone booth and made a call. Preston and his son waited on the sidewalk. Banks came back and nodded.

“It’s all right,” he said, and gave Preston a piece of paper. Preston drove off while Tommy showed Banks the way to his favorite ice-cream parlor.

The flat was small and discreet, in a modern building off Chelsea Manor Street. Sir Nigel answered the door himself. He was, as usual, full of Old World courtesy. “My dear John, how good of you to come.” If someone had been brought into his presence trussed like a chicken and borne by four heavies, he still would have said: “How good of you to come.”

When they were seated in the small sitting room, the Master held out the original Preston report. “My sincere thanks. Extremely interesting.”

“But not believable, apparently.”

Sir Nigel glanced at the younger man sharply but chose his words with care. “I would not necessarily agree to that.” Then he smiled quickly and changed the subject. “Now, please don’t think ill of Barry, but I asked him to keep an eye on you. It appears you are not too happy in your work at present.”

“I’m not in work at present, sir. I’m on compulsory leave.”

“So I gather. Something that happened in Glasgow, was it?”

“You haven’t received a report yet on the Glasgow incident of last week? It concerned a Russian seaman, a man I believe was a courier. Surely that involves Six?”

“Doubtless it will be on its way before long,” said Sir Nigel carefully. “Would you be kind enough to tell me about it?”

Preston started at the beginning and told the tale through to the end, so far as he knew it. Sir Nigel sat as if lost in thought, which he was: taking in every word with part of his mind and calculating with the rest.

They would not really try it, would they? he was thinking. Not breach the Fourth protocol? Or would they? Desperate men sometimes take desperate measures, and he had several reasons to know that in a number of areas—food production, the economy, the war in Afghanistan—the USSR was in desperate waters. He noted that Preston had stopped talking. “Do forgive me,” he said. “What do you deduce from it all?”

“I believe Semyonov was not a merchant navy deckhand, but a courier. That conclusion seems to me unavoidable. I do not believe he would have gone to those lengths to protect what he was carrying, or to end his life to avoid what he must have thought would be interrogation by us, unless he had been instructed his mission was of crucial importance.”

“Fair enough,” conceded Sir Nigel. “And so?”

“And so I believe there was an intended recipient of that disk of polonium, either directly through a rendezvous or indirectly by dead drop. That means there’s an illegal here, on the ground. I think we should try to find him.”

Sir Nigel pursed his lips. “If he’s a top illegal, finding him will be a needle-in-a-haystack affair,” he murmured.

“Yes, I know that.”

“If you had not been sent on compulsory leave, what would you have sought authority to do?”

“I think, Sir Nigel, that one disk of polonium is of no use to anybody. Whatever the illegal is up to, there must be other components. Now, it seems that whoever mounted the Semyonov incursion has taken a policy decision not to use the Soviet Embassy’s diplomatic bag. I don’t know why—it would have been much easier to ship a small, lead-lined package into Britain in the embassy bag and have one of their Line N people leave it at a dead drop for collection by the man on the ground. So I ask myself why they didn’t just do that. And the short answer is, I don’t know.”

“Right,” conceded Sir Nigel, “and so?”

“So if there has been one consignment—useless in itself—there must be others. Some may have already arrived. On the law of averages, there must be more yet to come. And apparently they are coming in via ‘mules,’ who pose as harmless seamen and God knows what else besides.”

“And you would want to do—what?” asked Sir Nigel.

Preston took a deep breath. “I would have wanted”—he stressed the conditional—“to check back on all entrants from the Soviet Union over the past forty, fifty, even one hundred days. We could not count on another mugging by hooligans, but there might have been some other incident. I would have tightened up controls on all entrants from the USSR, and even from the whole East Bloc, to see if we could intercept another component. As head of C5(C) I could have done that.”

“And you think now that you won’t get the chance?”

Preston shook his head. “Even if I were allowed to go back to work tomorrow, I’m pretty certain I would be off the case. Apparently I’m an alarmist and I make waves.”

Sir Nigel nodded pensively. “Poaching between the services is not regarded as terribly good form,” he said, as if thinking aloud. “When I asked you to go down to South Africa for me, it was Sir Bernard who sanctioned it. Later I learned that the assignment, however temporary, had caused—how shall I put it?—some hostility in certain quarters at Charles Street.

“Now, I don’t need an open quarrel with my sister service. On the other hand, I take a view, shared by yourself, that there might be more to this iceberg than the tip. In short, you have four weeks’ leave. Would you be prepared to spend that time working on this case?”

“For whom?” asked Preston, bewildered.

“For me,” said Sir Nigel. “You couldn’t come to Sentinel. You’d be seen. Word would get around.”

“Then where would I work?”

“Here,” said C. “It’s small but comfortable. I have the authority to ask for exactly the same information as you would if you were at your desk. Any incident involving a Soviet or East Bloc arrival will have been recorded, either on paper or in a computer. Since you cannot get to the files or the computer, I can arrange for the files and printouts to be brought to you. What do you say?”

“If Charles Street finds out, I’m finished at Five,” said Preston. He was thinking of his salary, of his pension, of the chances of getting another job at his age, of Tommy.

“How much longer do you think you have got at Charles under its present management?” asked Sir Nigel.

Preston laughed shortly. “Not long,” he said. “All right, sir, I’ll do it. I want to stay on this case. There’s something buried in there somewhere.”

Sir Nigel nodded approvingly. “You’re a tenacious man, John. I like tenacity. It usually yields results. Be here on Monday at nine. I’ll have two of my own lads waiting for you.

Ask them for what you want, and they’ll get it.”

On Monday morning, April 20, as Preston started work in the Chelsea flat, an internationally famous Czech concert pianist arrived at Heathrow Airport from Prague, en route to his Wigmore Hall concert the following evening.

The airport authorities had been alerted, and in deference to the musician’s venerability, customs and immigration formalities were as little onerous as possible. The elderly pianist was met after the customs hall by a representative of the sponsoring organization and, with his small entourage, was whisked off to his suite at the Cumberland Hotel.

His retinue consisted of his dresser, who looked after his clothes and other personal effects with dedicated devotion; a female secretary who handled his fan mail and correspondence; and his personal aide, a tall, lugubrious man named Lichka, who took care of finances and negotiations with host organizations, and seemed to live on a diet of antacid tablets.

That Monday, Lichka was working his way through an abnormally large number of his pills. He had not wanted to do what was required of him, but the men from the StB had been extremely persuasive. No one in his right mind deliberately affronted the men of the StB, Czechoslovakia’s secret police and intelligence organization, or wished to be invited for further discussions at their headquarters, the dreaded “Monastery.” The men had made plain that Lichka’s granddaughter’s admission to the university would be so much easier to arrange if he were prepared to help them—a polite way of saying the girl did not stand a chance of entering if he failed them.

When they had given him back his shoes, he could find no trace of interference, and according to instructions had worn them on the flight and straight through Heathrow Airport.

That evening, a man walked up to the reception desk and politely asked the number of Lichka’s room. Equally politely he was given it. Five minutes later, at the precise hour Lichka had been briefed to expect it, there was a soft knock at his door. A piece of paper was pushed under it. He checked the identification code, opened the door five inches, and passed out a plastic bag containing his shoes. Unseen hands took the bag and Lichka closed the door. When he had flushed the scrap of paper down the toilet, he sighed with relief. It had been easier than he had expected. Now, he thought, we can get on with the business of making music.

Before midnight, in a backwater of Ipswich, the shoes joined the plaster cast and the radio in a bottom drawer. Courier Four had delivered.

Sir Nigel Irvine visited Preston at the Chelsea apartment on Friday afternoon. The MI5 man was looking exhausted, and the flat was awash with files and computer printout paper.

He had spent five days and had come up with nothing. He had started with every entry into Britain from the USSR over the past forty days. There had been hundreds: trade delegates, industrial buyers, journalists, trade-union stooges, a choir group from Georgia, a dance troupe of Cossacks, ten athletes and all their entourage, and a team of doctors for a medical conference in Manchester. And those were just the Russians.

Also entering from the Soviet Union were the returning tourists: the culture-vultures who had been admiring the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, the school party that had been singing in Kiev, and the “peace” delegation that had been providing rich fodder for the Soviet propaganda machine by condemning its own country at press conferences in Moscow and Kharkov.

Even that list did not include the Aeroflot crews who had been shuttling in and out as part of the normal air traffic, so First Officer Romanov hardly rated a mention.

There was, of course, no reference to a Dane coming into Birmingham from Paris and leaving through Manchester.

By Wednesday, Preston had had two options; stay with entrants from the USSR but go back sixty days, or widen the net to take in all entrants from any East Bloc country. That meant thousands and thousands of arrivals. He had decided to stay with his forty-day time scale but to include the non-Soviet Communist states. The paperwork began to get waist-high.

Customs had been most helpful. There had been some confiscations, but always for an excess of the duty-free allowance. Nothing of inexplicable character had been seized.

Immigration had come up with no “bent” passports, but that was to be expected. The weird and wonderful bits of paperwork sometimes proffered at passport control by people from the Third World were never produced by people from the Communist bloc. Not even time-expired passports, the usual reason for an immigration officer’s stopping a visitor from entry. In Communist countries a traveler’s passport was so thoroughly checked before departure that there was little chance of his being detained at the British end.

“And that,” said Preston gloomily, “still leaves the uncheckables—the merchant seamen, entering without controls at more than twenty commercial ports; the crews from the fishing factory ships now riding off Scotland; the commercial aircrews, who are hardly checked at all; and those with diplomatic cover.”

“As I thought,” said Sir Nigel. “Not easy. Have you any idea what you are looking for?”

“Yes, sir. I had one of your lads spend Monday out at Aldermaston with the people in nuclear engineering. It seems that disk of polonium would be suitable for a device that was small, crude, basic in design, and not very powerful—if one can describe any atomic bomb as ‘not very powerful.’ ” He handed Sir Nigel a list of items. “Those are, at a guess, something like what we are looking for.”

C studied the list of artifacts. “Is that all it takes?” he asked at length.

“In kit form, apparently, yes. I’d no idea they could be made so basic. Apart from the fissionable core and the steel tamper, that stuff could be hidden almost anywhere and excite no attention.”

“All right, John, where do you go now?”

“I’m looking for a pattern, Sir Nigel. It’s all I can look for. A pattern of entries and exits by the same passport number. If one or two couriers are being used, they would have to come in and out frequently, using different entry and exit points, probably different departure points abroad; but if a pattern shows up, we could put out an all-nation alert for a limited group of passport numbers. It’s not much, but it’s all I have.”

Sir Nigel rose. “Keep at it, John. I’ll get you access to anything you ask for. Let’s just pray whoever we are dealing with slips up, just once, by using the same courier twice or three times.”

But Major Volkov was more efficient than that. He did not slip up. He had no idea what the components were or what they were to be used for. He simply knew he had been ordered to ensure their entry into Britain in time for a series of rendezvous, that each courier would have memorized his primary and backup meets, and that nothing was to pass through the KGB rezidentura in the London embassy.

He had nine cargoes to infiltrate and twelve couriers prepared. Some, he knew, were not professionals, but where their cover was impeccable and their journey had been arranged weeks or months earlier, as in the case of Lichka the Czech, he had homed in on them.

In order not to alert Major General Borisov by stripping him of a further twelve illegals and their legends, he had cast his net wider than the USSR by calling on three of the sister services: the StB of Czechoslovakia, the SB of Poland, and, most of all, the obedient and unquestioning Haupt Verwaltung Aufklärung (HVA) of East Germany.

The East Germans were particularly good. While there are Polish and Czech communities in West Germany, France, and Britain, the East Germans had one great advantage. Because of the ethnic identicality of East and West Germans, and the feet that millions of former Easterners had already fled to West Germany, the HVA, from its East Berlin base, ran by far a greater number of in-place illegals in the West than any other East Bloc service.

Volkov had decided to use only two Russians, and they would be the first to go in. He had no way of knowing that one would be mugged by street thugs, nor was he aware that the false seaman’s consignment was no longer locked up in a Glasgow police station. He just took treble precautions because that was his nature and his training.

For his remaining seven cargoes he was using one courier supplied by the Poles, two by the Czechs (including Lichka), and four by the East Germans. The tenth courier, replacing the dead Courier Two, would also come from the Poles. For the structural alterations that he needed to make to two motor vehicles, Volkov was even using a garage and workshop run by the HVA in Brunswick, West Germany.

Only the two Russians and the Czech, Lichka, would have East Bloc departure points; plus, now, the tenth, who would have to come from the Polish Airline, LOT.

Volkov was simply not allowing the appearance of any of the patterns Preston now sought in his sea of paperwork in Chelsea.

Sir Nigel Irvine, like so many who have to work in central London, tried to get away at the weekends for a breath of fresh air. He and Lady Irvine stayed in London during the week but kept a small, rustic cottage in southeast Dorset, on the Isle of Purbeck, at a village called Langton Matravers.

That Sunday C had donned a tweed coat and hat, taken a thick ash stick, and walked down the lanes and tracks to the cliffs above Chapman’s Pool at St. Alban’s Head. The sun was bright but the wind chilly. It blew the silver wisps of hair that escaped his hat away over his ears like small wings. He took the cliff path and walked deep in thought, occasionally pausing to stare out over the tossed whitecaps of the English Channel.

He was thinking of the conclusions of Preston’s original report and of the remarkable concurrence of Sweeting in his Oxford reclusiveness. Coincidence? Straws in the wind?

Grounds for conviction? Or just a lot of nonsense from a too-imaginative civil servant and a fanciful academic?

And if it was all true, could there be any link with a small disk of polonium from Leningrad that had arrived uninvited in a Glasgow police station?

If the metal disk was what Wynne-Evans had said, what did that signify? Could it possibly mean that someone, far out over those tossing waves, was really trying to breach the Fourth Protocol?

And if that was true, who could that someone be? Chebrikov and Kryuchkov of the KGB? They would never dare act except under the orders of the General Secretary. And if the General Secretary was behind it all—why?

And why not use the diplomatic bag? So much simpler, easier, safer. To this last question, he thought he could discern an answer. Using the embassy bag would mean using the KGB rezidentura inside the embassy. Better than Chebrikov, Kryuchkov, or the General Secretary, C knew that the rezidentura had been penetrated. He had his source Andreyev inside it.

The General Secretary, C suspected, had good reason to be shaken by the recent spate of defections from the KGB. All the evidence coming across was that the disillusionment at every level in Russia had become so profound that it was even affecting the elite of elites. Apart from the defections, starting in the late 1970s and growing through the 1980s there had been mass expulsions of Soviet diplomats across the world, caused in part by their own desperation to recruit agents, but leading to even further desperation as the diplomatic controllers were compelled to leave and the networks fell into disarray. Even Third World countries that, a decade ago, had danced to the Soviet tune were now asserting themselves and expelling Soviet agents for grossly undiplomatic conduct.

Yes, a major operation conducted outside the auspices of the KGB made sense. Sir Nigel had heard on good authority that the General Secretary was becoming paranoid about the level of Western penetration of the KGB itself. For every traitor who runs over, went the adage in the intelligence community, you can bet there’s another one still in place.

So, there was a man out there, running couriers and their cargoes into Britain, dangerous cargoes, bringing anarchy and chaos in a manner that C could not yet discern but was ceasing to doubt, even as he walked. And that man worked for another man, very high, who had no love for this small island.

“But you won’t find them, John,” he murmured to the unheeding wind. “You’re good, but they are better. And they hold the aces.”

Sir Nigel Irvine was one of the last of the old grandees, one of a passing breed, being replaced at every level of his society by new men of a different type, even at the highest stratum of the civil service, where continuity of style and type was something of a household god.

So he gazed out at the Channel, as so many Englishmen had done before him, and made his decision. He was not convinced of the existence of a threat to the land of his forefathers, only of the possibility of such a menace. But that was enough.

Farther along the coast, on the downs above the small Sussex port of Newhaven, another man gazed at the tossing waves of the English Channel.

He was dressed in black leather, his helmet on the seat of his parked BMW motorcycle.

A few Sunday strollers walked with their children across the downs, but they took no notice of him.

He was watching the approach of a ferry, well over the horizon and beating her way toward the shelter of the harbor mole. The Cornouailles would arrive from Dieppe in thirty minutes. Somewhere on board should be Courier Five.

In fact, Courier Five was on the foredeck, watching the approach of the English coast.

He was one of those who had no car, but his ticket was for the boat train right through to London.

Anton Zelewski, his passport said, and it was perfectly accurate. A West German passport, the immigration officer noted, but there was nothing odd in that. Hundreds of thousands of West Germans have Polish-sounding names. He was passed through.

Customs examined his suitcase and his bag with the duty-free allowance, bought on board the ship. His bottle of gin and his twenty-five cigars in an unopened box were within the permitted limits. The customs officer nodded him through and turned his attention to someone else.

Zelewski had indeed bought a box of twenty-five good cigars in the duty-free shop on the Cornouailles. He had then retired to a bathroom, locked himself in, and eased the identifying duty-free labels off the newly bought box, only to stick them on an identical box he had brought with him. The other went overboard into the waiting sea.

On the train to London, Zelewski sought out the first-class carriage next to the engine, selected the required window seat, and waited. Just before Lewes, the door opened and a man in black leather stood there. A glance confirmed that the compartment was empty except for the German.

“Does this train go straight to London?” he asked in unaccented English.

“I believe it also stops at Lewes,” Zelewski replied.

The man held out his hand. Zelewski passed him the flat box of cigars. The man stuffed it under his jacket, nodded, and left. When the train started out of Lewes, Zelewski saw the man once again, on the opposite platform, waiting for a train back to Newhaven.

Before midnight the cigars joined the radio, plaster cast, and shoes in Ipswich. Courier Five had delivered.

Chapter 17

Sir Nigel was right. By Thursday, the last day of April, the reams of computer printout had shown up no pattern at all of East Bloc citizens, from whatever point of departure, entering Britain on repeated occasions over the previous forty days. Nor was there a pattern of persons of any particular nationality entering the country from the East over the same period.

A number of passports containing various irregularities had shown up, but that was par for the course. Each had been checked, its bearer strip-searched, but the answer was still a big zero. Three passports on the “stop” list had appeared; two were previous deportees seeking reentry, and one was an American underworld figure connected to gambling and narcotics. These three were also searched before being put on the next plane out, but there was not an iota of evidence that they had been couriers for Moscow.

If they’re using West Bloc citizens, or in-place illegals with impeccable documentation as West Bloc citizens, I’ll never find them, thought Preston.

Sir Nigel had again relied on his long friendship with Sir Bernard Hemmings to secure the cooperation of Five. “I have reason to believe the Center is going to try to slip an important illegal into the country in the next few weeks,” he had said. “The trouble is, Bernard, I don’t have an identity, description, or place of entry. Still, any help your contacts at the points of entry could give us would be highly appreciated.”

Sir Bernard had made the request a Five operation, and the other arms of the state—customs, immigration, Special Branch, and docks police—had agreed to keep more than the usual weather eye open either for a foreigner trying to slip past the controls or for an odd or unexplainable item being carried in as luggage.

The explanation was plausible enough, and not even Brian Harcourt-Smith linked it to the report by John Preston on the polonium disk; the report was still in his pending tray while he considered what to do with it.

The camper van arrived on May Day. It had West German registration and came in to Dover on the ferry from Calais. The owner and driver, whose papers were in perfect order, was Helmut Dorn, and he had with him his wife, Lisa, and their two small children, Uwe, a flaxen-haired boy of five, and Brigitte, their seven-year-old daughter.

When they had passed immigration, the van rolled toward the nothing-to-declare green zone of customs, but one of the waiting officers gestured it to stop. After reexamining the papers, the customs official asked to look in the back. Herr Dorn complied.

The two children were playing in the living area and stopped when the uniformed customs man entered. He nodded and smiled at them; they giggled. He glanced around the neat and tidy interior, then began to look into the cupboards. If Herr Dorn was nervous, he hid it well.

Most of the cupboards contained the usual bric-a-brac of a family on a camping holiday—clothes, cooking utensils, and so forth. The customs man flicked up the bench seats, beneath which lockers served as extra storage space. One of them was apparently the children’s toy locker. It contained two dolls, a teddy bear, and a collection of soft rubber balls, brightly painted with large, gaudy disks in different colors.

The little girl, overcoming her shyness, delved into the locker and pulled out one of the dolls. She babbled excitedly at the customs man in German. He did not understand, but he nodded and smiled.

“Very nice, love,” he said. Then he stepped out of the back door and turned to Herr Dorn. “Very well, sir. Enjoy your holiday.”

The camper van rolled with the rest of the vehicles out of the sheds and onto the road to the town of Dover and the highways leading to the rest of Kent and to London.

“Gott sei dank,” breathed Dorn to his wife, “wir sind durch.”

She did the map-reading, but it was simple enough. The main M20 to London was so clearly marked no one could miss it. Dorn checked his watch several times. He was a bit late, but his orders were under no circumstances to exceed the speed limit.

They found the village of Charing, lying to one side of the main road, without difficulty, and just to the north of it the Happy Eater cafeteria on the left. Dorn swung into the parking lot and stopped. Lisa Dorn took the children into the café for a snack.

Dorn, according to orders, raised the engine cover and buried his head beneath it. Several seconds later he felt a presence beside him and looked up. A young Englishman in black motorcycle leathers stood there.

“Having a little trouble?” he asked.

“I think it must be the carburetor,” Dorn answered.

“No,” said the motorcyclist gravely, “I suspect it comes from the distributor. Also, you are late.”

“I’m sorry, it was the ferry. And customs. I have the package in the back.”

Inside the van, the motorcyclist produced a canvas bag from under his jacket, while Dorn, grunting and straining, lifted one of the children’s balls out of the toy locker.

It was only five inches in diameter, but it weighed a mite over twenty kilograms, or forty-four pounds. Pure uranium-235 is, after all, twice as heavy as lead.

Carrying the canvas bag across the parking lot, to his motorcycle, Valeri Petrofsky had to use his considerable strength to hold the bag one-handed, as though it contained nothing of note. No one noticed him, anyway. Dorn closed the van’s hood and joined his family in the café. The motorcycle, with its cargo in the box behind the pillion, roared away toward London, the Dartford Tunnel, and Suffolk. Courier Six had delivered.

By May 4 Preston had realized he was up a blind alley. After two weeks he still had nothing to show for his ferreting other than a single disk of polonium that had fallen into his hands by a pure fluke. He knew it was out of the question to ask for the strip-searching of every visitor entering Britain. All he could do was request increased surveillance on all East Bloc citizens coming in, plus an immediate alert to himself in the case of any suspect passport. There was one other, last chance.

From what the experts in nuclear engineering at Aldermaston had reported, three of the items required for even the most basic nuclear bomb would have to be extremely heavy.

One would be a block of pure uranium-235; one would be a tamper, cylindrical or globular in shape, made of high-tensile hardened one-inch-thick steel; and the third would be a steel tube, also high-tensile and hardened, one inch thick, about eighteen inches long, and weighing thirty pounds.

He estimated these three, at least, would have to be brought into the country in vehicles, and asked for an intensification of searches of foreign vehicles with an eye on cargoes resembling a ball, a globe, and a tube of extreme heaviness.

He knew the catchment area was vast. There was a constant stream of motorcycles, cars, vans, and trucks flowing in and out of the country every day of the year. The jamming of commercial traffic alone, if every truck were stopped and stripped, would almost bring the country to a halt. He was looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack, and he did not even have a magnet.

The strain was beginning to tell on George Berenson. His wife had left him and returned to her brother’s stately home in Yorkshire. He had completed twelve sessions with the team from the ministry and identified for them every single document he had ever passed to Jan Marais. He knew he was under surveillance, and that did not help his nerves, either.

Nor did the daily routine of going to the ministry fully aware that the Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Peregrine Jones, knew about his treachery. The final strain upon him was caused by the fact that he still had to pass occasional packages of apparently purloined documents from the ministry to Marais, for transmission to Moscow. He had managed to avoid actually meeting Marais since he had learned the South African was a Soviet agent.

But he was required to read the material he was passing to Moscow via Marais, just in case Marais called him for a clarification of something already sent.

Every time he read the papers he was to pass on, he was impressed by the skill of the forgers. Each document was based on a real paper that had come across his desk, but with changes so subtle that no individual detail could arouse suspicion. Yet the cumulative effect was to give a quite false impression of Britain’s and NATO’s strength and preparedness. On Wednesday, May 6, he received and read a batch of seven papers referring to recent decisions, proposals, briefings, and queries supposed to have reached his desk over the previous fortnight. All were marked either TOP SECRET or COSMIC, and one of them caused him to raise his eyebrows. He passed them to the Benotti ice-cream parlor that evening and received his coded call of acknowledgment of safe receipt twenty-four hours later.

That Sunday, May 10, in the seclusion of his bedroom at Cherryhayes Close, Valeri Petrofsky crouched over his powerful portable radio set and listened to the stream of signals in Morse coming over the Moscow Radio commercial band he had been allocated.

His set was not a transmitter; Moscow would never allow a valuable illegal to endanger himself by sending his own messages, not with British and American direction-finding countermeasures as good as they were. What he had was a huge Braun radio, purchasable in any good electronics shop, that would pick up almost any channel in the world.

Petrofsky was tense. It had been a month since he had used the Poplar transmitter to alert Moscow that he had lost a courier and his cargo and ask for a replacement. Each second evening and on alternate mornings, whenever he was not out on his motorcycle making collections, he had listened for a reply. So far, it had not come.

At ten past ten that evening, he heard his own call sign coming over the airwaves. He already had his pad and pencil ready. After a pause, the message began. He jotted down the letters, a jumble of undecipherable figures, straight from Morse into English. The Germans, British, and Americans would be recording the same letters in their various listening posts.

When the transmission ended, he switched off the set, sat at his dressing table, selected the appropriate one-time pad, and began to decipher. He had it in fifteen minutes: Firebird Ten replacing Two RVT. It was repeated three times.

He knew Rendezvous T. It was one of the alternates, to be used only if the occasion demanded, as indeed it now had. And it was in an airport hotel. He preferred wayside cafés or railway stations, but knew that although he was the kingpin of the operation, there were some couriers who for professional reasons had only a few hours in London and could not leave the city.

There was one other problem. They were slotting Courier Ten between two other meets, and perilously close to the rendezvous with Courier Seven.

Ten had to be met at the hour of breakfast in the Post House, Heathrow; Seven would be waiting in a hotel parking lot outside Colchester that same morning at eleven. It would mean hard riding, but he could do it.

Late in the evening of Tuesday, May 12, the lights were still burning in 10 Downing Street, office and residence of the British premier. Mrs. Margaret Thatcher had called a strategy conference of her closest advisers and inner cabinet. The only issue on the agenda was that of the forthcoming general election; the meeting was to formalize the decision and decide the timing.

As usual, she made her own view plain from the outset. She believed she would be right to go for a third four-year administration, even though the constitution allowed her to govern until June 1988. There were several who at once doubted the wisdom of going to the country so soon, though on previous evidence they doubted they would get very far. When the British Prime Minister had a gut feeling for something, it took some very powerful counterarguments to dissuade her. On this issue, statistics seemed to support her.

The Conservative Party chairman had all the public-opinion-poll findings at his fingertips. The Liberal/Social Democrat alliance, these showed, seemed stuck at about twenty percent of the support of the national electorate. Under the British system, this would give them between fifteen and twenty seats in Parliament. That left the electoral fight looking like the traditional struggle between the Conservative and Labour parties.

As for the timing, the indicators seemed to support the Prime Minister in her wish for an early election. Since June 1983, with its newfound image of tolerance, unity, and moderation, the Labour Party had hauled itself back a full ten percentage points in the polls, and stood only four percent behind the Conservatives. Moreover, the gap could well be closing. The Hard Left was almost mute, the Labour manifesto moderated, and public television appearances confined to members of Labour’s centrist wing. In short, the British public had almost completely regained its confidence in Labour as an alternative party of government.

There was general agreement by midnight that it had to be the summer of 1987, or not until June 1988. Mrs. Thatcher pressed for 1987 and won her point. On the question of the length of the election campaign, she urged a short, three-week snap campaign as against the more traditional four weeks. Again, she won her argument.

Finally, it was agreed; she would seek an audience with the Queen on Thursday, May 28, and ask for a dissolution of Parliament. In accordance with tradition she would return to Downing Street immediately afterward to make a public statement. From that moment the election campaign would be on. Polling day would be Thursday, June 18.

While the ministers still slept in the hour before dawn, the BMW cruised toward London from the northeast. Petrofsky rode out to the Post House Hotel at Heathrow Airport, parked, locked the machine, and shut away his crash helmet in the box behind the pillion.

He eased off his black leather jacket and zip-sided trousers. Beneath the leather trousers he wore an ordinary pair of gray flannels, creased but passable. He dropped his jackboots into one of the saddlebags, from which he had taken a pair of shoes. The leathers went into the other bag, from which came a nondescript tweed jacket and tan raincoat. When he left the parking lot and walked into the hotel reception area, he was just an ordinary man in an ordinary mackintosh.

Karel Wosniak had not slept well. For one thing, he had been given the shock of his life the previous evening. Normally the aircrews of the Polish LOT airlines, for which he was a senior steward, passed through customs and immigration almost as a formality. This time they had been searched, really searched. When the British officer attending to him had started to rummage through his shaving kit he had nearly been sick from worry.

When the man extracted the electric razor the SB people had given him in Warsaw before takeoff, he had thought he would faint. Fortunately it was not a battery-operated or re-chargeable model. There had been no available electric plug to turn it on. The officer had put it back and completed his search, to no avail. Wosniak supposed that if someone had turned the shaver on, it would not have worked. After all, there must be something in it apart from the usual motor. Why else should he be required to bring it to London?

At eight precisely, he entered the men’s room just off the reception area on the hotel’s ground floor. A nondescript-looking man in a tan raincoat was washing his hands. Damn, thought Wosniak, when the contact shows up, we’ll have to wait until this Englishman leaves. Then the man spoke to him, in English.

“ ’Morning. Is that the Yugoslav airline uniform?”

Wosniak sighed with relief. “No, I am from the Polish national airline.”

“Lovely country, Poland,” said the stranger, wiping his hands. He seemed completely at ease. Wosniak was new to this—and he had promised himself this would be the first and last time. He just stood on the tiled floor, holding his razor. “I have spent many happy times in your country,” the stranger continued.

That’s it, thought Wosniak. “Many happy times ...” the phrase of identification.

He held out the razor. The Englishman scowled and glanced at one of the booth doors.

With a start, Wosniak realized the door was closed; there was someone in there. The stranger nodded to the shelf above the washbasins. Wosniak put the razor on it. Then the Englishman nodded toward the urinals. Hastily Wosniak unzipped his fly and stood in front of one. “Thank you,” the burbled. “I, too, think it is beautiful.”

The man in the tan raincoat pocketed the razor, held up five fingers to indicate that Wosniak should stay there for five minutes, and left.

An hour later, Petrofsky and his motorcycle were clearing the suburbs where northeast London borders the county of Essex. The M12 motorway opened up in front of him. It was nine o’clock.

At that hour the Tor Britannia ferry of the DFDS line from Gothenburg was easing herself alongside the Parkstone Quay at Harwich, eighty miles away on the Essex coast.

The passengers, when they came off, were the usual crowd of tourists, students, and commercial visitors. Among the latter was Mr. Stig Lundqvist, who was driving his big Saab sedan.

His papers said he was a Swedish businessman and they did not lie. He was indeed Swedish, and had been all his life. The papers omitted to mention that he was also a longtime Communist agent who worked, like Herr Helmut Dorn, for the redoubtable General Marcus Wolf, the Jewish head of foreign operations for the East German HVA intelligence service.

Lundqvist was asked to step out of his car and bring his suitcases to the examination bench. This he did with a courteous smile. A customs officer lifted the Saab’s hood and glanced at the engine. He was looking for a globe the size of a small football or a rodlike tube that might be secreted within the compartment. There was nothing like that. He glanced under the frame of the car and finally into the trunk. He sighed. These demands from London were a pain in the neck. The trunk contained nothing but the usual toolkit, a jack strapped to one side, and a fire extinguisher banded to the other. The Swede stood at his side, his suitcases in his hand.

“Please,” said the Swede, “is all right?”

“Yes, thank you, sir. Enjoy your stay.”

An hour later, just before eleven, the Saab rolled into the parking lot of the Kings Ford Park hotel in the village of Layer de la Haye, just south of Colchester. Lundqvist got out and stretched. It was the midmorning coffee hour and there were several cars in the lot, all unattended. He glanced at his watch—five minutes to rendezvous time. Close, but he knew he would have had the extra hour of waiting time had he been late, then a backup rendezvous somewhere else. He wondered if and when the contact would show. There was no one around except a young man tinkering with the engine of a BMW motorcycle.

Lundqvist had no idea what his contact would look like. He lit a cigarette, got back into his car, and sat there.

At eleven, there was a tap on the window. The motorcyclist stood outside. Lundqvist pressed the button and the window hissed down. “Yes?”

“Does the S on your license plate stand for Sweden or Switzerland?” asked the Englishman. Lundqvist smiled with relief. He had stopped on the road and detached the fire extinguisher, which now reposed in a burlap bag on the passenger seat.

“It stands for Sweden,” he said. “I have just arrived from Gothenburg.”

“Never been there,” said the man. Then, without a change of inflection, he added, “Got something for me?”

“Yes,” said the Swede, “it’s in the bag beside me.”

“There are windows looking onto the parking lot,” said the motorcyclist. “Drive around the car lot, swing past the motorcycle, and drop the bag to me out of the driver’s window.

Keep the car between me and the windows. Five minutes from now.”

He sauntered back to his machine and went on tinkering. Five minutes later the Saab swung past him, the bag slipped to the ground; Petrofsky had picked it up and dropped it into his open saddlebag before the Saab cleared the hotel windows. He never saw the Saab again, nor did he want to.

One hour later he was in his garage in Thetford, exchanging motorcycle for family sedan and stowing his two cargoes in the trunk. He had no idea what they contained. That was not his job.

In the early afternoon he was home in Ipswich, the two consignments stored in his bedroom. Couriers Ten and Seven had delivered.

John Preston had been due back at work at Gordon Street on May 13.

“I know it’s frustrating, but I’d like you to stay on,” said Sir Nigel Irvine on one of his visits. “You’ll have to call in with a bad dose of flu. If you need a doctor’s chit, let me know. I have a couple who’ll oblige.”

By the sixteenth, Preston knew he was up a blind alley. Without a major national alert, customs and immigration had done all they could. The sheer volume of human traffic prevented intensive searching of every visitor. It had been five weeks since the mugging of the Russian seaman in Glasgow, and Preston was convinced he had missed the rest of the couriers. Perhaps they had all been in the country before Semyonov, and the deckhand had been the last. Perhaps ...

With growing desperation he realized he did not know if he had a deadline at all, or, if he did, when it was.

On Thursday, May 21, the ferry from Ostende berthed at Folkestone and discharged its habitual contents of tourists on foot, others in cars, and the grunting stream of trucks that haul the freight of the European Economic Community from one end of the Continent to the other.

Seven of the trucks were of German registration, Ostende being a favored port on the Britain run for firms operating in north Germany. The big Hanomag articulated rig with its containerized cargo on the trailer behind was no different from all the others. The fat sheaf of paperwork that took an hour to clear was in good order and there was no reason to believe the driver worked for anyone other than the haulage contractor whose name was painted on the side of the cab. Nor was there any reason to think the rig contained anything other than its prescribed delivery of German coffeemakers for the British breakfast table.

Behind the cab, two big vertical exhaust pipes jutted toward the sky, carrying the fumes from the diesel engine up and away from other road users. It was already evening, the day shift was drawing to a weary close, and the truck was waved forward on the road to Ashford and London.

No one at Folkestone could be expected to know that one of those vertical exhaust tubes, belching dark fumes as it left the customs shed, had a bypass pipe inside it to carry the fumes, or, amid the roar of starting engines, that the sound baffles had been removed to create extra space.

Long after dark, in the parking area of a roadhouse near Lenham, in Kent, the driver climbed to the top of his cab, unbolted that exhaust pipe, and withdrew from it an eighteen-inch-long package wrapped in heatproof cladding. He never opened it; he just handed it to a black-clothed motorcyclist who sped off into the darkness. Courier Eight had delivered.

“It’s no good, Sir Nigel,” John Preston told the Chief of the SIS on Friday evening. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on. I fear the worst, but I can’t prove it. I’ve tried to find just one more of those couriers I believe have come into this country, and I’ve failed.

I think I should go back to Gordon on Monday.”

“I know how you feel, John,” said Sir Nigel. “I feel much the same. Please give me just one more week.”

“I can’t see the point,” said Preston. “What more can we do?”

“Pray, I suppose,” said C gently.

“One break,” said Preston angrily. “All I need is just one small break.”

Chapter 18

John Preston got his break the following Monday afternoon, May 25.

At just after four o’clock, an Austrian Airlines flight came into Heathrow from Vienna.

One of the travelers aboard, who presented himself at the passport desk for non-UK and non-EEC citizens, offered a perfectly authentic Austrian passport that proclaimed its bearer to be one Franz Winkler.

The immigration officer examined the familiar green, plastic-covered Reisepass, fronted by the emblematic gold eagle, with the usual apparent indifference of his profession. It was of current issue, dotted with half a dozen other European entry and exit stamps, and included a valid UK visa.

Beneath his desk the officer’s left hand tapped out the passport number, perforated through every page of the booklet. He glanced at the display screen, closed the passport, and handed it back with a brief smile. “Thank you, sir. And the next, please.”

As Herr Winkler picked up his suitcase and moved through, the officer raised his eyes to a small window twenty feet away. At the same time, his right foot pressed an “alert”

button near the floor. From the office window, one of the resident Special Branch men caught his gaze. The immigration officer looked in the direction of Herr Winkler’s back and nodded. The face of the Special Branch detective withdrew from the window and seconds later he and a colleague were slipping quietly after the Austrian. Another Special Branch man was rustling up a car in front of the concourse.

Winkler had no heavy luggage, so he ignored the carousels in the baggage hall and went straight through the green channel of customs. In the concourse he spent some time at the Midland Bank changing traveler’s checks into sterling currency, during which time one of the Special Branch men got a good photograph of him from an upper balcony.

When the Austrian took a cab from the rank in front of Number Two Building, the Special Branch officers piled into their own unmarked car and were right behind him.

The driver concentrated on following the taxi; the senior Special Branch detective used the radio to inform Scotland Yard, whence, according to procedure, the information went also to Charles Street. There was a standing order to the effect that Six was also interested in any visitor carrying a “bent” passport, so the tip-off was passed by Charles Street to Sentinel House.

Winkler took his cab as far as Bayswater and paid the driver at the junction of Edgware Road and Sussex Gardens. Then he walked, suitcase in hand, down Sussex Gardens, one side of which is almost entirely taken up with modest bed-and-breakfast boardinghouses of the type favored by commercial travelers and by late arrivals from nearby Paddington Station on modest budgets.

It seemed to the Special Branch officers watching from their car across the street that Winkler had no reservation, for he ambled down the street until he came to a boardinghouse with a VACANCIES sign in the window and went in. He must have got a room because he did not emerge.

It was one hour after Winkler’s cab had left Heathrow, and at that time the phone rang in Preston’s Chelsea flat. His contact man at Sentinel, the one ordered by Sir Nigel to liaise with Preston, was on the line.

“There’s a Joe just came in at Heathrow,” said the MI6 man. “It may be nothing, but his passport number came up little red lights on the computer. Name of Franz Winkler, Austrian, off the Vienna flight.”

“They didn’t pick him up, I hope?” said Preston. He was thinking that Austria is conveniently close to Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Being neutral, it is also a good jumping-off point for Sovbloc illegals.

“No,” said the man at Sentinel. “According to our standing request they tailed him. ...

Hold on.. ..” He came back on the line a few seconds later. “They’ve just ‘housed’ him at a small B-and-B hotel in Paddington.”

“Can you pass me over to C?” asked Preston.

Sir Nigel was in conference, which he left to return to his private office. “Yes, John.”

When Preston had related the basic facts to the Chief of the SIS, Sir Nigel asked, “Do you think he’s the man you’ve been waiting for?”

“He could be a courier,” said Preston. “He’s as good as we’ve had in the past six weeks.”

“What do you want, John?”

“I’d like Six to ask for the watchers to take over. All reports reaching the watchers’

controller at Cork to be monitored by one of your people as and when they come in; same to be fed at once to Sentinel and then to me. If he makes a meet, I’d like both men tailed.”

“All right,” said Sir Nigel. “I’ll ask for the watchers. Barry Banks will sit in at the Cork radio room and pass the developments down the line as they come in.”

The Chief himself called the director of K Branch and made his request. The head of K

contacted his colleagues at A Branch and a standby team of watchers headed for Sussex Gardens. They happened to be led by Harry Burkinshaw.

Preston paced the small apartment in a rage of frustration. He wanted to be out on the streets, or at least at the center of the operation, not tucked away like a deep-cover man in his own country, the pawn in a power game being conducted at a level far above his head.

By seven that evening, Burkinshaw’s men had moved in, taking over the watch from the Special Branch men, who happily went off duty. It was a warm and pleasant evening; the four watchers who formed the “box” took up their unobtrusive stations around the hotel—one up the street, one down, one across, and one in back. The two cars positioned themselves amid scores of others parked along Sussex Gardens, ready to move if Chummy took flight. All six men were in contact via their own communicator sets, and Burkinshaw with head office, the radio room in the basement at Cork. Barry Banks was in Cork also, since this was an operation requested by Six, and they all waited for Winkler to make contact.

The trouble was, he did not. He did nothing. He just sat in his hotel room behind the net curtains and lay low. At eight-thirty he came out, walked to a restaurant on Edgware Road, had a simple supper, and went back again. He made no drop, picked up no instructions, left nothing at his table, spoke to no one in the street.

But he did two things of interest. He stopped sharply in Edgware Road on his way to the restaurant, stared in a shop window for several seconds, then headed back the way he had come. It’s one of the oldest tricks for trying to spot a tail, and not a very good one.

On leaving the restaurant he paused at the curb, waited for a gap in the surging traffic, then sprinted across. On the far side he paused again and scanned the street to see if anyone else had hurried across after him. No one had. All Winkler had done was join Burkinshaw’s fourth watcher, who had been on the other side of Edgware Road all the time. While Winkler scanned the traffic to see who might be risking life and limb to pursue him, the watcher was a few feet away, pretending to hail a cab.

“He’s ‘bent,’ all right,” Burkinshaw told Cork. “He’s surveillance-conscious, and not very good.”

Burkinshaw’s judgment reached Preston in his Chelsea hideout. He nodded in relief. It was beginning to look better.

After his gyrations on Edgware Road, Winkler returned to his boardinghouse and spent the rest of the night inside.

Meanwhile, another small operation was taking its inspired course in the basement at Sentinel House. The photos of Winkler taken by the Special Branch men in Heathrow Airport, together with others taken on the street in Bayswater, had been developed and were being placed reverentially before the gaze of the legendary Miss Blodwyn.

Identification of foreign agents, or of foreigners who might possibly be agents, forms a major part of any intelligence organization. To assist in this task, every year hundreds of thousands of pictures are taken by all the services of people who may, or may not, be working for their rivals. Even allies are not excluded from the snapshot albums. Foreign diplomats, members of trade, scientific, and cultural delegations: all are photographed as a matter of course—particularly, but not always, if they come from Communist or sympathizer countries. The archives grow and grow. The portraits often include twenty shots of the same man or woman, taken at different times and in different places. They are never thrown away. What they are used for is to get a “make.”

If a Russian with the name of Ivanov shows up accompanying a Soviet trade delegation to Canada, his photographed face will almost certainly be passed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to their colleagues in Washington, London, and the other NATO capitals.

It may well be that the same face, calling itself Kozlov, was snapped five years earlier as a visiting journalist covering the independence celebrations of an African republic. If there is any question as to Ivanov’s real profession as he takes in the beauties of Ottawa, a make like that will dispel all doubts. It tags him as a full-time KGB hood.

The exchange of such photos among the allied intelligence arms—and these include the brilliant Israeli Mossad—is continuous and comprehensive. Very few Sovbloc visitors to the West, or even to the Third World, do not end up gazing from an album of photographs in at least twenty different democratic capitals. Of course, no one enters the Soviet Union without winding up in the Center’s own master gallery of happy snaps.

It is the almost hilarious case, but perfectly true, that while the CIA “cousins” use banks of computers in which are stored millions and millions of facial features to try to match up the incoming daily flow of photographs, Britain uses Blodwyn.

An elderly and often ill-used lady, forever harassed by her younger male colleagues for a quick identification, Blodwyn has been in the job forty years and works underneath Sentinel House, where she presides over the huge archive of pictures that make up MI6’s

“mug book.” Not a book at all, it is in fact a cavernous vault where are stored rows and rows of volumes of photographs, of which Blodwyn alone possesses an encyclopedic knowledge.

Her mind is something like the CIA’s computer bank, which she can occasionally defeat. In her memory is stored not the tiniest detail of the Thirty Years’ War or even the Wall Street stock prices; her mind stores faces. Shapes of noses, lines of jaws, casts of eyes; the sag of a cheek, the curve of a lip, the way a glass or cigarette is held, the glint of a capped tooth in a smile taken in an Australian pub and showing up years later in a London supermarket—all are grist to the mill of her remarkable memory.

That night, while Bayswater slept and Burkinshaw’s men hugged the shadows, Blodwyn sat and stared at the face of Franz Winkler. Two silent younger men from Six waited. After an hour she simply said, “Far East,” and went off along the rows of her albums. She had her make in the small hours of Tuesday, May 26.

It wasn’t a good photograph and it was five years old. The hair had been darker then, the waist slimmer. The man was attending a reception at the Indian Embassy, standing beside his own ambassador and smiling deferentially.

One of the younger men stared at the two photographs doubtfully. “Are you sure, Blodwyn?”

If looks could cripple, he would have needed to invest in a wheelchair. He backed away hastily and made for a telephone. “There’s a make,” he said. “He’s a Czech. Five years ago he was a low-level gofer in the Czech Embassy in Tokyo. Name: Jiri Hayek,”

Preston was woken by the telephone at three in the morning. He listened, thanked the caller, and replaced the phone. He smiled happily. “Gotcha,” he said.

At ten in the morning, Winkler was still inside his hotel. Control of the operation at Cork Street had been taken over by Simon Margery, from K2(B), the Soviet Satellites/Czechoslovakia (Operations) desk. After all, a Czech was their affair. Barry Banks, who had slept in the office, was with him, passing developments down the line to Sentinel House.

At the same hour, John Preston made a call to the legal counselor at the American Embassy, a personal contact. The legal counselor at Grosvenor Square is always the London representative of the FBI. Preston made his request and was told he would be called back as soon as the answer came from Washington, probably in five to six hours, bearing in mind the time difference.

At eleven, Winkler emerged from the boardinghouse. He walked to Edgware Road again, hailed a cab, and set off toward Park Lane. At Hyde Park Corner, the cab, tailed by two cars containing the watcher team, went down Piccadilly. Winkler dismissed it in Piccadilly, close to the Circus end, and tried another few basic maneuvers to throw off a tail he had not even spotted.

“Here we go again,” Len Stewart muttered into his lapel. He had read Burkinshaw’s log and expected something similar. Suddenly Winkler shot down an arcade at a near-run, emerged at the other end, scuttled down the sidewalk, and turned to watch the entrance to the arcade from which he had just emerged. No one came out. No one needed to. There was already a watcher at the southern end of the arcade, anyway.

The watchers know London better than any policeman or cabdriver. They know how many exits every major building has, where the arcades and underpasses go, where the narrow passageways are located and where they lead to. Wherever a Joe tries to scuttle, there will always be one man there ahead of him, one coming slowly behind, and two flankers. The “box” never shatters, and it is a very clever Joe who can spot it.

Satisfied he had no tail, Winkler entered the British Rail Travel Center on Lower Regent Street. There he inquired as to the times of trains to Sheffield. The scarved Scottish football fan standing a few feet away and trying to get back to Motherwell was one of the watchers. Winkler paid cash for a second-class round-trip ticket to Sheffield, noted that the last train of the night left St. Paneras Station at nine-twenty-five, thanked the clerk, and left. He had lunch at a café nearby, returned to Sussex Gardens, and stayed there all afternoon.

Preston received the news about the train ticket to Sheffield at just after one o’clock.

He caught Sir Nigel Irvine just as C was about to leave for lunch at his club.

“It may be a blind, but it looks as if he’s going out of town,” Preston reported. “He may be heading for his rendezvous. It could be on the train or in Sheffield. Maybe he’s delayed so long because he was early. The point is, sir, if he leaves London we will need a field controller to go with the watcher team. I want to be that controller.”

“Yes, see what you mean. Not easy. Still, I’ll see what I can do.”

Sir Nigel sighed. Bang goes lunch, he thought. He summoned his aide. “Cancel my lunch at White’s. Get my car ready. And take a cable. In that order.”

While the aide tackled the first two tasks, C called Sir Bernard Hemmings at his home number near Farnham, in Surrey. “Sorry to trouble you, Bernard. Something’s cropped up that I’d like your advice on. ... No, better face-to-face. Would you mind if I came down? Lovely day, after all. ... Yes, right, about three, then.”

“The cable?” asked his aide, entering the office.

“Yes.”

“To whom?”

“Myself.”

“Certainly. From?”

“Head of station, Vienna.”

“Shall I alert him, sir?”

“No need to bother him. Just arrange with the cipher room for me to receive his cable in three minutes.”

“Of course. And the text?”

Sir Nigel dictated it. Sending himself an urgent message to justify what he wanted to do anyway was an old trick that he had picked up from his onetime mentor, the late Sir Maurice Oldfield. When the cipher room sent it back up in the form in which it would have been received from Vienna, the old mandarin put it in his pocket and went down to his car.

He found Sir Bernard in his garden, enjoying the warm May sunshine, a blanket around his knees.

“Meant to come in today,” said the Director-General of Five with well-feigned joviality. “Be in tomorrow, no doubt.”

“Of course, of course.”

“Now, how can I help?”

“Ticklish,” said Sir Nigel. “Someone has just flown into London from Vienna.

Apparent Austrian businessman. But he’s a phony. We got a make on him last night.

Czech agent, one of the StB boys. Low-level. We think he’s a courier.”

Sir Bernard nodded. “Yes, I keep in touch, even from here. Heard all about it. My chaps are on top of him, aren’t they?”

“Very much so. The thing is, it looks as if he may be leaving London tonight. For the north. Five will need a field controller to go with the watcher team.”

“Of course. We’ll have one. Brian can handle it.”

“Yes. It’s your operation, of course. Still ... You remember the Berenson affair? We never did discover two things. Does Marais communicate through the rezidentura here in London, or does he use couriers sent in from outside? And was Berenson the only man in the ring run by Marais, or were there others?”

“I recall. We were going to put those questions on ice until we could get a few answers out of Marais.”

“That’s right. Then today I got this message from my head of station in Vienna.”

He proffered the cable. Sir Bernard read it and his eyebrows rose. “Linked? Could they be?”

“Possible. Winkler, a.k.a. Hayek, seems to be a courier of some kind. Vienna confirms he’s nominally StB but actually working for the KGB itself. We know that Marais went to Vienna twice in the past two years, while he was running Berenson. Each time on cultural jaunts, but—”

“The missing link?”

Sir Nigel shrugged. Never oversell.

“What’s he going to Sheffield for?”

“Who knows, Bernard? Is there another ring up there in Yorkshire? Could Winkler be a bagman for more than one ring?”

“What do you want from Five? More watchers?”

“No, John Preston. You’ll recall he tracked down Berenson first, then Marais. I liked his style. He’s been on leave for a while. Then he had a dose of the flu, so they tell me.

But he’s due to return to work tomorrow. He’s been off so long, he’ll probably have no current cases, anyway. Technically, he’s ports and airports, C5(C). But you know how the K boys are always worked off their feet. If he could just have a temporary attachment to K2(B), you could designate him field controller for this one.”

“Well, I don’t know, Nigel. This is really up to Brian. ...”

“I’d be awfully grateful, Bernard. Let’s face it, Preston was on the Berenson hunt from the start. If Winkler is part of it all, Preston might even see a face he’s seen before.”

“All right,” said Sir Bernard. “You’ve got it. I’ll issue the instruction from here.”

“I could take it back if you like,” said C. “Save you the trouble. Send my driver up to Charles Street with the chit. ...”

Sir Nigel left with his “chit,” a written order from Sir Bernard Hemmings putting John Preston on temporary assignment to K Branch and naming him field controller of the Winkler operation once it left the metropolis.

Sir Nigel had two copies made, one for him and one for John Preston. The original went to Charles Street. Brian Harcourt-Smith was out of the office, so the order was left on his desk.

At 7:00 p.m. John Preston left the Chelsea apartment for the last time. He was out in the open again and loved it.

At Sussex Gardens he slipped up behind Harry Burkinshaw. “Hello, Harry.”

“Good Lord. John Preston. What are you doing here?”

“Taking a breath of air.”

“Well, don’t make yourself visible. We’ve got a Joe holed up there across the way.”

“I know. I gather he’s due to leave for Sheffield on the nine-twenty-five.”

“How did you know that?”

Preston produced his copy of Sir Bernard’s instruction. Burkinshaw studied it. “Wow.

From the DG himself. Join the party, then. Just stay out of sight.”

“Got an extra radio?”

Burkinshaw nodded down the street. “Round the corner, on Radnor Place. Brown Cortina. There’s a spare in the glove compartment.”

“I’ll wait in the car,” said Preston.

Burkinshaw was puzzled. No one had told him that Preston was joining them as field controller. He had not even known that Preston was in Czech Section. Still, the DG’s signature carried a lot of weight. For his part, he would just get on with his job. He shrugged, popped another mint, and went on watching.

At 8:30 Winkler left the hotel. He was carrying his suitcase. He hailed a passing cab and gave his instructions to the driver.

When Winkler stepped out of the doorway, Burkinshaw called in his team and his two cars. He jumped in the first one and they were a hundred yards behind the cab across Edgware Road. Preston was in the second car. Ten minutes later they knew they were heading east, toward the station. Burkinshaw reported this.

Simon Margery’s voice came back from Cork. “Okay, Harry, our field controller is on his way.”

“We’ve already got a field controller,” said Burkinshaw. “He’s with us.”

This was news to Margery. He asked the controller’s name. When he heard it, he thought there had been a mistake. “He’s not even with K2(B),” he protested.

“He is now,” said Burkinshaw, unfazed. “I’ve seen the chit. Signed by the DG.”

Margery called Charles Street. As the cavalcade cruised east through the dusk, a flap ensued at Charles. The instruction from Sir Bernard was traced and confirmed. Margery threw up his hands in exasperation. “Why can’t the buggers up there in Charles ever make up their minds?” he asked an uncaring world. He called off the colleague he had designated to take over at St. Paneras Station. Then he tried to trace Brian Harcourt-Smith to complain.

Winkler paid off his cab, headed through the brick archway into the vaulted dome of the Victorian railway station, and consulted the departure board. Around him the four watchers and Preston vaporized into the throng of passengers in the brick-and-cast-iron concourse.

The 9:25, calling at Leicester, Derby, Chesterfield, and Sheffield, was at platform two.

Having found his train, Winkler walked up the length of it, past the three first-class carriages and the buffet car, to the three blue-upholstered second-class carriages near the front end. He selected the middle one, hefted his suitcase onto the rack, and sat quietly awaiting the train’s departure.

After a few minutes, a young black man with earphones over his head and a Walkman clipped to his belt came in and sat three rows away. Once seated, the man nodded his head in time to the apparent reggae blasting into his ears, closed his eyes, and enjoyed his music. One of Burkinshaw’s team was in place; the earphones were silent of reggae music but were picking up Harry’s instruction on strength five.

One of Burkinshaw’s team took the front carriage, and Harry himself and John Preston the third, so that Winkler was boxed. The fourth man took a first-class seat in the last car in case Winkler did a “runner” down the train to shake off what he thought was a tail.

At 9:25 on the dot the Inter-City 125 hissed out of St. Paneras and headed north. At 9:30 Brian Harcourt-Smith was traced to the dining room of his club and called to the phone. It was Simon Margery. What he heard caused the Deputy Director-General of Five to hasten outside, grab a taxi, and race the two miles across the West End to Charles Street. On his desk he found the order written out earlier that afternoon by Sir Bernard Hemmings. He went quite pale with rage.

He was a highly self-disciplined man, and after thinking the matter over for several minutes, he picked up the phone and in his usual courteous manner asked the operator to get the service’s legal adviser at his home. The legal adviser is the man who does most of the liaison between the service and the Special Branch. While the call was going through, Harcourt-Smith checked train times to Sheffield. The legal adviser was plucked from his seat in front of the television in Camberley and came on the line.

“I need Special Branch to make an arrest,” said Harcourt-Smith. “I have reason to believe an illegal immigrant suspected of being a Soviet agent may escape surveillance.

Name: Franz Winkler; supposed Austrian citizen. Holding charge: suspected false passport. He’ll be arriving by train from London at Sheffield at eleven-fifty-nine. Yes, I know it’s short notice. That’s why it’s urgent. Yes, please get on to the commander of Special Branch at the Yard and ask him to alert his Sheffield operation to make the arrest when the train arrives at Sheffield.”

He put down the phone grimly. John Preston might have been sicced on him as field director of the surveillance team, but an arrest of a suspect was a policy matter, and that was his department.

The train was almost empty. Two carriages instead of six would have amply accommodated the sixty passengers on board. Barney, the watcher in the front carriage, shared the space with ten others, all innocent passengers. He was facing aft, so that he could see the top of Winkler’s head through the window in the intercarriage door.

Ginger, the young black with the headphones who was with Winkler in the second carriage, had five other passengers in there with him. There were a dozen sharing sixty seats with Preston and Burkinshaw in the third. For an hour and a quarter, Winkler did nothing. He had no reading matter; he just stared out of the window at the dark countryside beyond.

At 10:45, when the train slowed for Leicester, he moved. He took his suitcase off the rack, walked up the carriage, passed out to the toilet area, and pulled down the window of the door giving onto the platform. Ginger informed the rest, who prepared to move at short notice if they had to.

Another passenger pushed past Winkler as the train stopped. “Excuse, please, is this Sheffield?” Winkler asked.

“No, it’s Leicester,” the man said, and descended to the platform.

“Ah, so. Thank you,” said Winkler. He put down his suitcase, but stayed at the open window, looking up and down the platform during the brief stopover. As the train pulled out, he returned to his seat and put his suitcase back on the rack.

At 11:12 he did it again at Derby. This time he asked a porter on the platform of the cavernous concrete hall that forms Derby Station.

“Derby,” sang out the porter. “Sheffield is the one after next.”

Again, Winkler spent the stopover gazing out of the open window, then returned to his seat and tossed his suitcase onto the rack. Preston was watching him through the intercarriage door.

At 11:43 they rolled into Chesterfield, a Victorian station that is beautifully maintained with bright paintwork and hanging baskets of flowers. This time Winkler left his suitcase where it was, but went to lean out of the window as two or three passengers left the train and hurried through the ticket barrier. The platform was empty before the train began to roll. When it did, Winkler snapped open the door, jumped to the concrete, and slammed the door closed with a backward movement of his arm.

Burkinshaw was very rarely caught off balance by a Joe, but he later admitted that Winkler had got him cold. All four of the watchers could easily have made the platform, but there was not an iota of cover on that strip of stone. Winkler would have seen them and aborted his rendezvous, wherever it was.

Preston and Burkinshaw ran forward to the boarding platform, where they were joined by Ginger from the carriage in front. The window was still open. Preston stuck his head out and looked back. Winkler, satisfied at last that he had no tail, was striding briskly down the platform with his back to the train.

“Harry, get back here with the team by car,” shouted Preston. “Get me on the radio when you’re in range. Ginger, close the door after me.” Then he shoved the door open, stepped to the running board, dropped into the paratrooper’s landing position, and jumped.

Paratroopers hit the deck at about eleven miles per hour; sideways speed depends on the wind. The train was doing thirty when Preston slammed into the embankment, praying he would not hit a concrete post or a large stone. He was lucky. The thick May grass took some of the shock; then he was rolling, knees together, elbows in, head down.

Harry told him later he couldn’t watch. Ginger said he was bouncing like a toy along the embankment and down toward the spinning wheels. When he finally stopped, he was lying in the gully between the grass and the roadbed. He hauled himself to his feet, turned, and began to jog back toward the lights of the station.

When he appeared at the ticket barrier, the guard was closing for the night. He looked with amazement at the grazed apparition in the torn coat.

“The last man through here,” gasped Preston, “short, stocky, gray mackintosh. Where did he go?”

The guard nodded toward the front of the station, and Preston ran. Too late, the guard realized he had not collected the ticket. At the same time, Preston was watching the taillights of a taxi sweeping out of the station and toward the town. It was the last taxi. He could, he knew, get the local police to trace the driver and ask where he had taken that fare, but he had no doubt Winkler would dismiss the cab short of his ultimate destination and walk the rest. A few feet away, a railway porter was kick-starting his moped.

“I need to borrow your bike,” said Preston.

“Bog off,” said the porter. There was no time for identification or argument; the lights of the taxi were passing under the new ring road and out of sight. So Preston hit him—

just once—on the jaw. The porter crashed over. Preston caught the falling moped, jerked it free of the man’s legs, straddled it, and rode off.

He was lucky with the traffic lights. The cab had gone up Corporation Street, and Preston would never have caught it on his tiny-engined putt-putt except that the lights outside the central library were red. When the taxi rolled down Holywell Street and into Saltergate, he was a hundred yards behind, and then he lost more ground as the bigger engine outpaced him for the straight half mile of that highway. If Winkler had been taken out into the countryside due west of Chesterfield, Preston could never have caught him.

Fortunately the taxi’s brakelights flashed on when it was a speck in the distance.

Winkler was paying the driver where Saltergate becomes Ashgate Road. As Preston closed the gap, he could see Winkler beside the cab, looking up and down the street.

There was no other traffic; Preston realized there was nothing for it but to keep going. He puttered past the halted taxi like a late homegoer about his business, swerved into Foljambe Road, and stopped.

Winkler crossed the road on foot; Preston followed. Winkler never looked back again.

He just strolled around the boundary wall of Chesterfield’s football stadium and entered Compton Street. Here he approached a house and knocked on the door. Moving between patches of shadow, Preston had reached the corner of the street and was hidden behind a bush in the garden of the corner house.

Up the street he saw lights come on in a darkened house. The door opened, there was a brief conversation on the doorstep, and Winkler went inside. Preston sighed and settled behind his bush for a night-long vigil. He could not read the number of the house Winkler had entered, nor could he watch the rear of the place as well, but he could see the towering wall of the football stadium behind the house, so perhaps there was no feasible exit on that side.

At two in the morning, he heard the faint noise of his communicator as Burkinshaw came back into range. He identified himself and gave his position. At half past two he heard the soft pad of footsteps and hissed to give his location. Burkinshaw joined him in the shrubbery.

“You all right, John?”

“Yes. He’s housed up there, second beyond the tree, with a light behind the curtain.”

“Got it. John, there was a reception party at Sheffield. Two Special Branch and three uniformed. Drummed up by London. Did you want an arrest?”

“Absolutely not. Winkler’s a courier. I want the big fish. He might be inside that house.

What happened to the Sheffield party?”

Burkinshaw laughed. “Thank God for the British police. Sheffield is Yorkshire; this is Derbyshire. They’re going to have to sort it out between their chief constables in the morning. It gives you time.”

“Yeah. Where are the others?”

“Down the street. We came back by taxi and dismissed it. John, we’ve got no wheels.

Also, come the dawn, this street’s got no cover.”

“Put two at the top of the street and two down here,” said Preston. “I’m going back into the town to find the police station and ask for a bit of backup. If Chummy leaves, tell me.

But shadow him with two of the team— keep two on that house.”

He left the garden and walked back into central Chesterfield looking for the police station, which he found on Beetwell Street. As he walked, a thought kept repeating itself in his head. There was something about Winkler’s performance that did not make sense.

Chapter 19

Superintendent Robin King was not pleased to be woken at three in the morning, but on hearing there was an officer from MI5 at his police station seeking assistance, he agreed to come at once, and was there, unshaven and uncombed, twenty minutes later. He listened attentively while Preston explained the gist of the story: that a foreigner believed to be a Soviet agent had been tailed from London, had jumped train at Chesterfield, and had been followed to a house on Compton Street, number as yet unknown.

“I do not know who lives in that house, or why our suspect has visited it. I intend to find out, but for the moment I do not want an arrest. I want to watch the house. Later this morning, we can sort out a fuller authority through the chief constable for Derbyshire; for the moment the problem is more urgent. I have four men from our watcher service on that street, but come the daylight they’ll stick out like sore thumbs. So I need some assistance now.”

“What, exactly, can I do for you, Mr. Preston?” the senior police officer asked.

“Have you got an unmarked van, for instance?”

“No. Several police cars, unmarked, and a couple of vans, but with police insignia on the side.”

“Can we get hold of an unmarked van and park it on that street with my men inside, just as a temporary measure?”

The superintendent called the duty sergeant on the phone. He put the same question and listened for a while. “Raise him on the phone and ask him to call me right now,” he said. To Preston: “One of our men has a van. It’s pretty battered—he’s always having his leg pulled about it.”

Thirty minutes later the sleepy police constable had made rendezvous with the watcher team outside the football stadium’s main entrance. Burkinshaw and his men piled inside and the van was driven to Compton Street and parked opposite the suspect house. On instructions, the policeman climbed out, stretched, and walked away down the road, for all the world like a man coming home after working the night shift.

Burkinshaw peered from the van’s rear windows and came on the radio to Preston.

“That’s better,” he said, “we’ve got a great view of the house across the street. By the way, it’s Number Fifty-nine.”

“Hold on there for a while,” said Preston. “I’m trying to fix something better.

Meanwhile, if Winkler leaves on foot, tail him with two men and leave two to stay with the house. If he leaves by car, follow in the van.” He turned to Superintendent King. “We may have to stake out that house for a longer period. That means taking over an upstairs room of a house across the way. Can we find anyone in Compton Street who might let us do that?”

The police chief was thoughtful. “I do know someone who lives on Compton Street,”

he said. “We’re both Masons, members of the same lodge. That’s how I know him. He’s a former chief petty officer in the navy, retired now. He’s at Number Sixty-eight. I don’t know where it’s located on the street, though.”

Burkinshaw confirmed that 68 Compton Street was across from the suspect house and two buildings up. The second-floor-front window, probably a bedroom, would provide a perfect view of the target. Superintendent King rang his friend from the station.

At Preston’s suggestion the policeman told the sleepy householder, a Mr. Sam Royston, that this was an official operation—they wished to watch a possible suspect who had taken refuge across the street. When he had gathered his wits, Royston rose to the occasion. As a law-abiding citizen he would certainly allow the police to use his front room.

The van was quietly driven around the block into West Street; Burkinshaw and his team slipped between the houses there, over the garden fences, and entered Royston’s house on Compton Street from the back garden. Just before the sun flooded the street, the watcher team settled down in the Roystons’ bedroom behind the lace curtains, through which they could see No. 59 across the way.

Royston, ramrod-stiff in camel dressing gown and bristling with the self-importance of a patriot asked to assist the Queen’s officers, glowered through the curtains to the house almost opposite. “Bank robbers, are they? Drug traffickers?”

“Something like that,” assented Burkinshaw.

“Foreigners,” growled Royston. “Never did like ’em. Should never have let ’em all into the country.”

Ginger, whose parents had come from Jamaica, stared stolidly through the curtains.

Mungo, the Scot, was bringing a pair of chairs up from below.

Mrs. Royston emerged like a mouse from some secret hiding place, having removed her curlers and hairpins. “Would anyone,” she inquired, “like a nice cup of tea?”

Barney, who was young and handsome, flashed his most winning smile. “That would be lovely, ma’am.”

It made her day. She began to prepare the first of what turned out to be an endless relay of cups of tea, a brew upon which she appeared to live without any visible recourse to solid foods.

At the police station the desk sergeant had also established the identity of the inhabitants of 59 Compton Street.

“Two Greek Cypriots, sir,” he reported to Superintendent King. “Brothers and both bachelors, Andreas and Spiridon Stephanides. Been here about four years, according to the constable on that beat. Seems they run a Greek kebab and take-away joint at Holywell Cross.”

Preston had spent half an hour on the phone to London. First he raised the duty officer at Sentinel, who put him through to Banks. “Barry, I want you to contact C wherever he is and ask him to call me back.”

Sir Nigel Irvine came on the line five minutes later, as calm and lucid as if he had not been asleep at all. Preston informed him of the night’s events.

“Sir, there was a reception party at Sheffield. Two Special Branch and three uniformed, authorized to make an arrest.”

“I don’t think that was part of the arrangement, John.”

“Not as far as I was concerned.”

“All right, John, I’ll handle it at this end. You’ve got the house. Are you going to move in now?”

“I’ve got a house,” corrected Preston. “I don’t want to move in because I don’t think it’s the end of the trail. One other thing, sir. If Winkler leaves and heads for home, I want him to be allowed to go in peace. If he is a courier, or message carrier, or just checking up, his people will be expecting him back in Vienna. If he fails to show, they’ll switch off the cutouts from top to bottom.”

“Yes,” said Sir Nigel carefully. “I’ll have a word with Sir Bernard about that. Do you want to stay with the operation up there or come back to London?”

“I’d like to stay up here, if possible.”

“All right. I’ll make it a top-level request from Six that what you want is accorded to you. Now, cover yourself and make your operational report to Charles Street.”

When he put the phone down, Sir Nigel called Sir Bernard Hemmings at his home. The Director-General of Five agreed to meet him for breakfast at the Guards Club at eight.

“So you see, Bernard, it really may be that the Center is mounting quite a large operation inside this country at the moment,” said C as he buttered his second piece of toast.

Sir Bernard Hemmings was deeply disturbed. He sat with his food untouched in front of him. “Brian should have told me about the Glasgow incident,” he said. “What the hell’s that report still sitting on his desk for?”

“We all make errors of judgment from time to time. Errare humanum est, and all that,”

murmured Sir Nigel. “After all, my Vienna people thought Winkler was a bagman for a longstanding ring of agents, and I deduced Jan Marais might be one of that ring. Now it appears there could be two separate operations, after all.”

He refrained from admitting that he himself had written the Vienna cable of the previous day in order to obtain what he wanted from his colleague—Preston’s inclusion as field controller in the Winkler operation. For C there was a time for candor and a time for discreet silence.

“And the second operation, the one linked to the intercept in Glasgow?” asked Sir Bernard.

Sir Nigel shrugged. “I just don’t know, Bernard. We’re all feeling our way in the dark.

Brian evidently does not believe it. He may be right. In which case I’m the one with egg all over his face. And yet, the Glasgow affair, the mysterious transmitter in the Midlands, the arrival of Winkler.. . That man Winkler was a lucky break, maybe the last we’ll get.”

“Then what are your conclusions, Nigel?”

C smiled apologetically. It was the question he had been waiting for. “No conclusions, Bernard. A few tentative deductions. If Winkler is a courier, I’d expect him to make his contact and hand over his package, or to pick up the package he came to collect, at some public place. A parking lot, river embankment, garden bench, seat by a pond ... If there is a big operation going down here, there must be a top-level illegal in on the ground. The man running the show. If you were he, would you want the couriers turning up at your doorstep? Of course not. You’d have one cutout, maybe two. Do have some coffee.”

“All right, agreed.” Sir Bernard waited as his colleague poured him a cup.

“Therefore, Bernard, it occurs to me that Winkler cannot be the big fish. He’s small potatoes—a bagman, a courier, or something else. Same goes for the two Cypriots in a small house in Chesterfield. Sleepers, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes,” agreed Sir Bernard, “low-level sleepers.”

“It begins to look, therefore, as if the Chesterfield house might be a depository for incoming packages, a mail drop, a safe house, or maybe the home of the transmitter.

After all, it’s in the right area; the two squirts intercepted by GCHQ were from the Derbyshire Peak District and the hills north of Sheffield, an easy drive from Chesterfield.”

“And Winkler?“

“What can one think, Bernard? A technician sent in to repair the transmitter if it develops problems? A supervisor to check on progress? Either way, I think we should let him report back that everything is in order.”

“And the big fish—do you think he might show up?”

Sir Nigel shrugged again. His own fear was that Brian Harcourt-Smith, balked of his intended arrest at Sheffield, would try to engineer the storming of the Chesterfield house.

For Sir Nigel, this would be wholly premature. “I should have thought there has to be a contact there somewhere. Either he comes to the Greeks or they go to him,” he said.

“You know, Nigel, I think we should stake out that house in Chesterfield, at least for a while.”

The Chief of the SIS looked grave. “Bernard, old friend, I happen to agree with you.

But young Brian seems very gung-ho to move in and make a few arrests. He tried last night at Sheffield. Of course, arrests look good for a while, but—”

“You leave Harcourt-Smith to me, Nigel,” said Sir Bernard grimly. “I may be pegging out, but there’s a bark left in the old dog yet. You know, I’m going to take over the direction of this operation personally.”

Sir Nigel leaned forward and placed his hand on Sir Bernard’s forearm. “I really wish you would, Bernard.”

Winkler left the house on Compton Street at half past nine, on foot. Mungo and Barney slipped out of the rear of the Royston house, through the garden, and picked up the Czech on the corner of Ashgate Road. Winkler went back to the station, took the London train, and was picked up at St. Paneras by a fresh team. Mungo and Barney went back to Derbyshire.

Winkler never returned to his boardinghouse. Whatever he had left there he abandoned, as he had the suitcase with pajamas and shirt on the train, and went straight to Heathrow.

He caught the afternoon flight to Vienna. Irvine’s head of station there later reported that Winkler was met on his arrival in Austria by two men from the Soviet Embassy.

Preston spent the rest of the day closeted in the police station attending to the wealth of administrative detail involved in a stakeout in the provinces. The bureaucratic machinery ground into action; Charles Street jacked up the Home Office, which authorized the chief constable of Derbyshire to instruct Superintendent King to afford Preston and his men every cooperation. King was happy to do so, anyway, but the paperwork had to be in order.

Len Stewart came up by car with a second team, and they were billeted in police bachelor quarters. Photos were taken with a long lens of the Stephanides brothers as they left Compton Street for their restaurant at Holywell Cross just before noon, and dispatched by motorcycle to London. Other experts came in from Manchester, went into the local telephone exchange, and put a tap on both their phones, at the house and at the restaurant. A direction-finder bleeper was slipped into their car.

By late afternoon London had a make on them. They were not true Cypriots, but they were brothers. Veteran Greek Communists, once active in the ELLAS movement, they had left mainland Greece for Cyprus twenty years earlier. Athens had therefore kindly informed London. Their real name was Costapopoulos. According to Nicosia, they had vanished from Cyprus eight years earlier.

Immigration records at Croydon revealed that the Stephanides brothers had entered Britain five years before as legitimate Cypriot citizens and had been permitted to stay.

Records in Chesterfield showed they had arrived there just three and a half years earlier from London, taken a long lease on the kebab place, and bought the small terrace residence on Compton Street. Since then they had lived as peaceful and law-abiding citizens. Six days a week they opened their restaurant for the lunch trade, which was slack, and stayed open until late, when they did a thriving trade in take-out suppers.

Nobody in the police station except Superintendent King was told the real reason for the stakeout, and only six were told at all. The others were informed that the operation was part of a nationwide drug bust. London people were being brought in only because they knew the faces.

Just after sundown, Preston finished the paperwork at police headquarters and went to join Burkinshaw and his team. Before leaving the police station he thanked Superintendent King profusely for all the latter’s assistance to him.

“Are you going to sit in during the stakeout?” asked the police chief.

“Yes, I’ll be there,” said Preston. “Why do you ask?”

King smiled sadly. “Half of last night we had a very aggrieved railway porter downstairs. Seems someone knocked him off his moped in the station yard and made off with it. We found the moped in Foljambe Road, quite undamaged. Still, he gave us a very clear description of his assailant. You won’t be going out much, will you?”

“No, I shouldn’t think so.”

“How very wise,” suggested King.

At his house on Compton Street Mr. Royston had been urged to continue his normal routine, visiting the shops in the morning and the bowling green in the afternoon. Extra food and drink would be brought in after dark, in case neighbors wondered at the Roystons’ sudden and vastly increased appetite. A small television set was brought in for what Royston termed “the lads upstairs,” and they all settled down to wait and watch.

The Roystons had moved into the back bedroom, and the single bed from that room was brought to the front. It would be shared in shifts by the watchers. Also brought in was a powerful set of binoculars on a tripod, plus a camera with a long lens for daylight shots and an infrared lens for night photography. Two fueled cars were parked close by, and Len Stewart’s people were running the communications room at the police station, linking the Royston house, with its handheld sets, and London.

When Preston arrived, the four watchers seemed to have made themselves quite at home. Barney and Mungo were snoozing, one on the bed and the other on the floor; Ginger was sitting in an easy chair sipping a cup of fresh-brewed tea; Harry Burkinshaw was sitting like a Buddha in an armchair behind the lace curtains, gazing across at the empty house.

A man who had spent half his life standing in the rain, Harry was quite content. He was warm, dry, had a large supply of mints, and had his shoes off. There were worse ways of watching, as he well knew. The target house even backed onto a fifteen-foot concrete wall, the football grounds, which meant no one need spend the night crouched in the bushes. Preston took the spare chair beside him, behind the mounted camera, and accepted a cup of tea from Ginger.

“Are you bringing up the covert-entry team?” Harry asked. He meant the skilled burglars that Technical Support maintained for clandestine break-ins.

“No,” said Preston. “For one thing, we don’t even know whether there is someone else in there as well. For another, there could be a range of warning devices to indicate that an entry has taken place, and we might not spot them all. Finally, what I’m waiting for is another Chummy to show up. When he does, we take the cars and tail him. Len can take over the house.”

They settled down in companionable silence. Barney woke up. “Anything on the telly?” he asked.

“Not much,” said Ginger. “The evening news. Usual rubbish.”

Twenty-four hours later, on Thursday evening at the same hour, the news was quite interesting. On their small screen they saw the Prime Minister standing on the steps of 10 Downing Street in a neat blue suit, facing a horde of press and television crews.

She announced she had just returned from Buckingham Palace, where she had asked for a dissolution of Parliament. In consequence, the country would prepare for a general election, to be held on June 18. The rest of the evening was devoted to the sensation, with the leaders and luminaries of all the parties announcing their confident expectation of victory.

“That’s one for the books,” Burkinshaw remarked to Preston. He could get no reply.

Lost in thought, Preston was staring at the screen. At last he said, “I think I’ve got it.”

“Well, don’t use our loo,” said Mungo.

“What’s that, John?” asked Harry when the laughter died down.

“My deadline,” said Preston, but he refused to elaborate.

By 1987 very few European-manufactured cars still retained the old-style large round headlights, but one that did was the evergreen Austin Mini. It was a vehicle of this type that was among the many cars to disembark on the evening of June 2 from the Cherbourg ferry arriving at Southampton.

The car had been bought in Austria four weeks earlier, driven to the clandestine garage in Germany, modified there, and driven back to Salzburg. The car had perfect Austrian papers, as did the tourist driving it, though he was in fact a Czech, the second and last of the contributions by the StB to Major Volkov’s plan to import into Britain the components Valeri Petrofsky needed.

The Mini was searched at customs, and nothing amiss was discovered. Clearing Southampton docks, the driver followed the directions he had been given until, in the northern suburbs of the port city, he pulled off the road into a large parking lot. It was quite dark already and at the rear of the lot he was out of sight of those still speeding down the main highway. He descended and with a screwdriver began to work on the headlights.

First he removed the chrome ring covering the gap between the headlight unit and the surrounding metal of the car’s fender. Using a larger screwdriver he then undid the screws holding the headlight firmly inside the fender. When they came free he eased the entire unit out of its socket, detached the wires that ran from the car’s electrical system into the rear of the lamp bowl, and laid the headlight, which appeared exceptionally heavy, in a canvas bag by his side.

It took almost an hour to extract both headlight units. When he had finished, the small car stared sightlessly ahead with empty sockets. In the morning, the agent knew, he would return with freshly purchased headlights from Southampton, fit them, and drive away.

For the moment he hefted the heavy canvas bag, went back to the highway, and walked three hundred yards back toward the port. The bus stop was where they had said it would be. He checked his watch; ten minutes to rendezvous.

Exactly ten minutes later, a man in motorcycle leathers strolled up to the bus stop.

There was no one else there. The newcomer glanced down the road and remarked, “It’s always a long wait for the last bus of the night.”

The Czech sighed with relief. “Yes,” he replied, “but, thank God, I should be home by midnight.”

They waited in silence until the bus for Southampton arrived. The Czech left the canvas bag on the ground and boarded the bus. As the taillights disappeared toward the port city, the motorcyclist lifted the bag and walked back up the road to where he had left his motorcycle.

At dawn, haying ridden to Thetford to change clothes and switch vehicles, he arrived home in Cherryhayes Close, Ipswich, carrying the last of the scheduled list of components he had waited for these long weeks. Courier Nine had delivered.

Two days later, the stakeout on the house on Compton Street, Chesterfield, was one week old and had absolutely nothing to report.

The Stephanides brothers lived lives of impeccable uneventfulness. They rose at about nine, busied themselves about their house, where they appeared to do all their own cleaning and dusting, and left in their five-year-old car for their restaurant just before midday. They stayed there until close to midnight, when they returned home to sleep.

There were no visitors and few phone calls. What calls there were involved orders for meat and vegetables or other harmless sundries.

Down at the restaurant at Holywell Cross, Len Stewart and his people reported much the same. The telephone was used more frequently, but again the talk was of orders for food, bookings for a table, or deliveries of wine. It was not possible for a watcher to dine there every night; the Greeks were apparently professionals who had spent years in the clandestine life and would have spotted a customer who came too frequently or loitered too long. But Stewart and his team did their best.

For the lads in the Royston house the main problem was boredom. Even Mr. and Mrs.

Royston were tiring of the inconvenience caused by their presence after the initial excitement wore off. Royston had agreed to volunteer as a canvasser for the Conservative Party—he resolutely declined to assist anybody else—and the front windows of the house now bore posters in favor of the local Tory candidate.

This enabled more coming and going than usual, since anyone wearing a Conservative rosette seen leaving or entering the house would attract no attention from the neighbors.

The ruse enabled Burkinshaw and his team, suitably rosetted, to take an occasional stroll while the Stephanides brothers were at their restaurant. It broke the monotony. The only one who seemed immune from boredom was Harry Burkinshaw.

For the rest, the principal distraction was television, kept at low volume, particularly when the Roystons were out, and the prime topic day and evening was the continuing election campaign. One week into the campaign, three things were becoming clear.

The Liberal/Social Democrat alliance had still failed to surge in the opinion polls and the issue seemed increasingly developing into the traditional race between the Conservatives and the Labour Party. The second factor was that all public-opinion polls indicated that the two main parties were much closer than could have been foreseen four years earlier, in 1983, when the Conservatives won a landslide; further, constituency-level polling indicated that the outcome in the eighty most marginal constituencies would almost certainly decide the color of the country’s next government. In every poll it was the “floating vote,” varying between ten and twenty percent, that held the balance.

The third development was that despite all the economic and ideological issues involved, and despite the efforts of all parties to make the most of them, the campaign was becoming increasingly dominated by the much more emotive issue of unilateral nuclear disarmament. In more and more polls the nuclear arms race issue was showing as the first or second priority of concern.

The pacifist movements, broadly Left and broadly united for once, were mounting what was in effect a parallel campaign of their own. Huge demonstrations took place on an almost daily basis, rewarded with equally copious coverage by newspapers and television. The movements, while demonstrating no noticeable fund-raising organization, seemed able from their combined resources to hire hundreds of buses at commercial rates to transport their demonstrators hither and thither across the land.

Hard Left luminaries of the Labour Party, agnostics or atheists to a man, shared every public or TV platform with clerics of the trendier wing of the Anglican Church, where the members of one group spent their allocated air time nodding in grave agreement with the points made by the other.

Inevitably, even though the alliance was not unilateralist, the primary target of the disarmers was the Conservative Party, just as their primary ally became the Labour Party.

The Party leader, supported by the National Executive, seeing which way the wind was blowing, publicly aligned himself and the Party to every one of the unilateralists’ demands.

Another theme that ran through the Left campaign was anti-Americanism. On a hundred platforms it rapidly became impossible for the interviewer or show host to extract from the disarmers’ spokesmen a single condemnatory word against Soviet Russia; the constantly reiterated theme was hatred of America, which was portrayed as warmongering, imperialistic, and a threat to world peace.

On Thursday, June 4, the campaign was enlivened by a sudden Soviet offer to

“guarantee” to recognize the whole of Western Europe, neutrals and NATO nations alike, as a nuclear-free zone in perpetuity if America would do the same.

An attempt by the British Defense Minister to explain that (a) the removal of European-American defenses was verifiable while Soviet warhead detargeting was not, and (b) the Warsaw Pact had a four-to-one conventional-weapons superiority over NATO’s, was howled down twice before lunch, and the minister had to be removed from the grip of the pacifists by bodyguards.

“Anyone would think,” grumbled Harry Burkinshaw as he popped another mint, “that this election was a national referendum on nuclear disarmament.”

“It is,” said Preston sharply.

Friday found Major Petrofsky shopping in Ipswich. In an office-equipment shop he acquired a small steel cabinet, thirty inches tall, eighteen wide, and twelve deep, with a door that locked securely. From a hardware store he bought a light, short-handled, two-wheel dolly of the type used for shifting garbage cans or heavy suitcases. A lumber merchant yielded two ten-foot planks and a variety of laths, rods, and short joists, while a do-it-yourself shop sold him a complete toolbox including a high-speed drill with a selection of bits for steel or wood, plus nails, bolts, nuts, screws, a pair of heavy-duty industrial gloves, and several sheets of foam rubber. He rounded off the morning in an electrical-supply shop with the purchase of four nine-volt batteries and a selection of multicolored electrical wiring. It took two journeys in his hatchback sedan to bring the loads back to Cherryhayes Close, where he stored them in the garage. After dark he brought most of the gear inside the house.

That night the radio told him in Morse the details of the arrival of the assembler, the one event he had not been required to memorize. It would be Rendezvous X and the date Monday, the eighth. Tight, he thought, damn tight, but he would still be on target.

While Petrofsky was crouched over his one-time pad deciphering the message and the Stephanides brothers were serving moussaka and shish kebab to a line of people who had just left the nearby bars at closing time, Preston was in the police station, on the phone to Sir Bernard Hemmings.

“The question is, John, how long we can keep going up there in Chesterfield without any results,” said Sir Bernard.

“It’s only been a week, sir,” said Preston. “Stakeouts have lasted a lot longer.”

“Yes, I well know that. The thing is, we usually have more to go on. There’s a growing move here that advocates crashing in on the Greeks to see what it is they’ve got stashed away in that house, if anything. Why won’t you agree on a clandestine entry while they’re at work?”

“Because I think they’re top pros and they’d spot they’d been gone over. If that happened, they’d probably have a foolproof way of warning off their controller from ever visiting them again.”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right. It’s all very well your sitting over that house like a tethered goat in India waiting for the tiger to come, but supposing the tiger doesn’t show?”

“I believe he will, sooner or later, Sir Bernard,” said Preston. “Please, give me a bit more time.”

“All right,” conceded Hemmings after a pause for a consultation at the other end. “A week, John. Next Friday I’ll have to jack up the Special Branch lads to go in there and take the place apart. Let’s face it, the man you’re looking for could have been inside there all the time.”

“I don’t believe he is. Winkler would never have visited the lair of the tiger himself. I believe he’s still out there somewhere, and that he’ll come.”

“Very well. One week, John. Friday next, it is.”

Sir Bernard hung up. Preston stared at the handset. The election was thirteen days away. He was beginning to feel dejected, that he could have been wrong all along.

Nobody else, with the possible exception of Sir Nigel, believed in his hunch. A small disk of polonium and a low-level Czech bagman were not much to go on, and might not even be linked.

“All right, Sir Bernard,” he told the buzzing receiver, “one week. After that I’m packing it in, anyway.”

The Finnair jet from Helsinki arrived the following Monday afternoon, on time, as usual, and its complement of passengers passed through Heathrow without undue problems.

One of them was a tall, bearded man of middle age whose Finnish passport claimed him to be Urho Nuutila, and whose fluent command of the language could be partly explained by his Karelian parentage. He was in fact a Russian named Vassiliev, by profession a scientist in nuclear engineering attached to the Soviet Army Artillery, Ordnance Research Directorate. He spoke passable English.

Having cleared customs, he took the airport courtesy bus to the Heathrow Penta Hotel, walked in through the front, kept going right past reception, and emerged at the rear door, which gave onto the parking lot. He waited by that door in the late-afternoon sunshine, unnoticed by anyone, until a small hatchback sedan drew abreast of him. The driver had his window open. “Is this where the buses from the airport drop the passengers?” he asked.

“No,” said the traveler. “I think that is around the front.”

“Where are you from?” asked the young man.

“Finland, actually,” said the bearded one.

“It must be cold in Finland.”

“No, at this time of year it is very hot. The main problem is the mosquitoes.”

The young man nodded. Vassiliev walked around the car and climbed in. They drove off.

“Name?” asked Petrofsky.

“Vassiliev.”

“That’ll do. Nothing more. I’m Ross.”

“Far to go?” asked Vassiliev.

“About two hours.”

They drove the rest of the way in silence. Petrofsky made three separate maneuvers to detect a tail, had there been one. They arrived at Cherryhayes Close by the last light of day. On the next-door patch of front lawn Petrofsky’s neighbor Mr. Armitage was mowing the grass.

“Company?” Armitage asked as Vassiliev descended from the car and walked to the front door.

Petrofsky took his guest’s single small suitcase from the back and winked at his neighbor. “Head office,” he whispered. “Best behavior. Might get promotion.”

“Oh, I should think so, then.” Armitage grinned and nodded in encouragement, and went on mowing.

Inside the sitting room, Petrofsky closed the curtains as he always did before putting on the light. Vassiliev stood motionless in the gloom. “Right,” he said when the lights went on. “To business. Have you got all nine consignments that were sent to you?”

“Yes. All nine.”

“Let’s confirm them. One child’s ball, weighing about twenty kilograms.”

“Check.”

“One pair shoes, one box cigars, one plaster cast.”

“Check.”

“One transistor radio, one electric shaver, one steel tube, extremely heavy.”

“That must be this.” Petrofsky went to a closet and held up a short length of heavy metal in heat-resistant cladding.

“It is,” said Vassiliev. “Finally, one handheld fire extinguisher, unusually heavy, and one pair car headlights, also very heavy.”

“Check.”

“Well, that’s it, then. If you’ve got the rest of the innocent commercial purchases, I’ll start assembling in the morning.”

“Why not now?”

“Look, young man. First of all, the sawing and drilling is hardly going to please the neighbors at this hour. Second, I’m tired. With this kind of toy you don’t make mistakes.

I’ll start fresh tomorrow and be finished by sundown.”

Petrofsky nodded. “Take the back bedroom. I’ll run you to Heathrow on Wednesday in time for the morning flight.”

Chapter 20

Vassiliev elected to work in the sitting room, with the curtains closed and by electric light. First he asked for the nine consignments to be assembled.

“We’ll need a garbage bag,” he said. Petrofsky fetched him one from the kitchen.

“Pass the items to me as I ask for them,” said the assembler. “First, the cigar box.”

He broke open the seals and lifted the lid. The box contained two layers of cigars, thirteen on the top and twelve below; each cigar was wrapped in an aluminum tube.

“It should be third from the left, bottom row.”

It was. He emptied the cigar from its tube and slit it open with a razor. From the sliced tobacco inside he withdrew a slim glass phial with a crimped end and two twisted wires sticking out. An electrical detonator. The waste went into the bag.

“Plaster cast.”

The cast had been made in two layers, the first allowed to harden before the second was applied. Between the two layers a sheet of gray, puttylike substance had been rolled flat, encased in polyethylene to prevent adhesion, and wrapped around the arm. Vassiliev prized the two layers of plaster of paris apart, peeled the gray substance from its cavity, pulled away the polyethylene protector sheets, and rolled it back into a ball. Half a pound of plastic explosive.

Given Lichka’s shoes, he cut away the heels of both. From one came a steel disk two inches in diameter and one inch thick. Its rim was threaded to turn it into a broad, flat screw, and one surface had a deep cut to take a wide-headed screwdriver. From the other heel came a flatter, two-inch-wide disk of gray metal; it was lithium, an inert metal that, when bonded during the explosion to the polonium, would form the initiator and cause the atomic reaction to reach its full force.

The complementary disk of polonium came from the electric shaver that had so worried Karel Wosniak, and replaced the one lost in Glasgow. There were five of the smuggled consignments left.

The heat-resistant cladding on the exhaust pipe from the Hanomag truck was stripped away to reveal an eighteen-inch-long steel tube weighing twenty kilograms. It had an internal diameter of two inches, external four inches, for the metal’s thickness was one inch and it was of hardened steel. One end was flanged and threaded internally, the other capped with steel. The capping had a small hole in the center, capable of allowing the electrical detonator to be passed through it.

From First Ofiïcer Romanov’s transistor radio Vassiliev extracted the timer device; a flat, sealed steel box, the size of two cigarette packs placed end to end. On one face it had two large round buttons, one red and one yellow; from the other side protruded two colored wires, negative and positive. Each corner had an earlike lug with a hole, for bolting to the outside of the steel cabinet that would contain the bomb.

Taking the fire extinguisher that had arrived in Lundqvist’s Saab, the assembler unscrewed the base, which the preparation team had cut open, reassembled, and repainted to hide the seam. Out of the interior came not fire-damping foam but wadding, and last of all a heavy rod of leadlike metal, five inches long and two inches in diameter. Small though it was, it still weighed four and a half kilograms. Vassiliev pulled on the heavy gloves to handle it. It was pure uranium-235.

“Isn’t that stuff radioactive?” asked Petrofsky, who was watching in fascination.

“Yes, but not dangerously so. People think that all radioactive materials are dangerous to the same degree. Not so. Luminous watches are radioactive, but we wear them.

Uranium is an alpha emitter, low-level. Now, plutonium—that’s really lethal. So is this stuff when it goes critical, as it will just before detonation—but not yet.”

The pair of headlights from the Mini took a lot of stripping. Vassiliev took out the glass lamps, the filament inside, and the inner reflector bowl. What he was left with was a pair of extremely heavy semispherical bowls, each of one-inch-thick hardened steel. Each bowl had a flange around its rim, drilled with sixteen holes to take the nuts and bolts.

Joined together, they would form a perfect globe.

One of the bowls had at its base a two-inch-wide hole, threaded inside to accept the steel plug from Lichka’s left shoe. The other had a short stump of tube sticking out from its base; internally it was two inches wide, and it was flanged and threaded on its outer side to screw into the steel “gun” tube from the Hanomag’s exhaust system.

The last item was the child’s ball, brought in by the camper van. Vassiliev cut away the bright rubberized skin. A ball of metal gleamed in the light.

“That’s lead wrapping,” he said. “The ball of uranium, the fissionable core of the nuke, is inside. I’ll get it out later. It’s also radioactive, like that piece over there.”

Having satisfied himself he had his nine components, he started work on the steel cabinet. Turning it on its back, he lifted the lid and with the wooden laths and rods prepared an inner frame in the form of a low cradle, which rested on the floor of the cabinet. This he covered with a thick layer of shock-absorbent foam rubber.

“I’ll pack more around the sides and over the top when the bomb’s inside,” he explained.

Taking the four batteries, he wired them up, terminal to terminal, then lashed them into a block with masking tape. Finally he bored four small holes in the lid of the cabinet and wired the block of batteries inside. It was now midday.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s put the device together. By the way, have you ever seen a nuke?”

“No,” said Petrofsky hoarsely. He was an expert in unarmed combat, unafraid of fists, knives, or guns. But the cold-blooded joviality of Vassiliev as he handled enough destructive power to flatten a town worried him. Like most people, Petrofsky regarded nuclear science as an occult art.

“Once they were very complicated,” said the assembler. “Very large, even the low-yield ones, and could be made only under extremely complex laboratory conditions. Today the really sophisticated ones, the multimegaton hydrogen weapons, still are. But the basic atomic bomb today has been simplified to a point where it can be assembled on just about any workbench—given the right parts, of course, and a bit of caution and know-how.”

“Great,” said Petrofsky. Vassiliev was cutting away the thin lead sheeting around the ball of uranium-235. The lead had been wrapped around cold, like wrapping paper, and its seams sealed with a blowtorch. It came apart quite easily. Inside was the inner ball, five inches in diameter, with a two-inch-wide hole drilled straight through the middle.

“Want to know how it works?” asked Vassiliev.

“Sure.”

“This ball is uranium. Weight, fifteen and a half kilograms. Not enough mass to have reached criticality. Uranium goes critical as its mass increases beyond criticality point.”

“What do you mean, ‘goes critical’?”

“It starts to fizz. Not literally, like soda. I mean fizz in radioactive terms. It passes to the threshold of detonation. This ball is not yet at that stage. See that short rod over there?”

“Yes.”

It was the uranium rod from the hollow fire extinguisher.

“That rod will fit exactly into the two-inch hole in the center of this ball. When it does, the whole mass will go critical. The steel tube over there is like a gun barrel, with the uranium rod as the bullet. In detonation the plastic explosive will blast the uranium rod down the tube and into the heart of this ball.”

“And it goes bang.”

“Not quite. You need the initiator. Left to itself, the uranium would fizz into extinction, create a hell of a lot of radioactivity, but no explosion. To get the bang you have to bombard the critical uranium with a blizzard of neutrons. Those two disks, the lithium and the polonium, form the initiator. Left apart, they are harmless; the polonium is a mild alpha-emitter, the lithium is inert. Smash them together and they do something odd. They start a reaction; they emit that blizzard of neutrons we need. Subjected to this, the uranium tears itself apart in a gigantic release of energy—the destruction of matter. It takes one hundred millionth of a second. The steel tamper is to hold it all together for that tiny period.”

“Who drops in the initiator?” asked Petrofsky in an attempt at gallows humor.

Vassiliev grinned. “No one. The two disks are in there already, but held apart. We put the polonium at one end of the hole in the uranium ball, and the lithium on the nose of the incoming uranium projectile. The bullet comes down the tube, into the heart of the ball, and the lithium on its nose is slammed into the polonium waiting at the other end of the tunnel. That’s it.”

Vassiliev used a drop of Super Glue to stick the polonium disk to one face of the flat steel plug from Lichka’s shoe heel. Then he screwed the plug into the hole at the base of one of the steel bowls. Taking the uranium ball, he lowered it into the bowl. The interior of that bowl had four nodules, which slotted into four indentations cast in the uranium.

When they met and engaged, the ball was held in place. Vassiliev took a pencil flashlight and peered down the hole through the core of the uranium ball.

“There it is,” he said, “waiting at the bottom of the hole.”

Then he placed the second steel bowl over the top, to form a perfect globe, and spent an hour tightening the sixteen bolts around the flange to hold the two halves together.

“Now, the gun,” he remarked. He pushed the plastic explosive down the eighteen-inch-long steel tube, tamping it firmly but gently with a broom handle from the kitchen until it was packed tightly. Through the small hole in the base of the tube, Petrofsky could make out the plastic explosive bulging up. With the same Super Glue, Vassiliev attached the lithium disk to the flat nose of the uranium rod, wrapped it in a tissue to ensure it could not slip back down the tube from vibration, and rammed the rod down onto the explosive at the bottom. Then he screwed the tube into the globe. It looked like a gray, seven-inch-diameter melon with an eighteen-inch handle sticking out of one end; a sort of oversized stick-grenade.

“Nearly done,” said Vassiliev. “The rest is conventional bomb-making.”

He took the detonator, separated the wires from its end and insulated each with tape. If they touched each other, there could be a premature detonation. A length of five-amp electrical wiring was twisted onto each wire from the detonator. Then he pressed the detonator through the hole in the far end of the tube until it was embedded in plastic explosive.

He lowered the bomb like a baby onto its foam-rubber cradle, packing more foam rubber all around its sides, and yet more over the top, as if it were going to bed. Only the two wires were kept free. One of these was attached to the positive terminal of the battery block. A third wire went from the negative terminal on the batteries, so Vassiliev still had one of each in his hands. He insulated each exposed end.

“Just in case they touch each other.” He grinned. “Now that would be bad news.”

The single unused component was the timer box. Vassiliev used the drill to bore five holes in the side of the steel cabinet near the top. The center hole was for the wires out of the back of the timer, which he fed through. The other four were for thin bolts with which he fixed the timer to the exterior of the cabinet. This done, he linked the wires from the batteries and detonator to those from the timer, according to their color coding. Petrofsky held his breath.

“Don’t worry,” said Vassiliev, who had noticed his apprehension. “This timer was repeatedly tested back home. The cutout, or circuit breaker, is inside, and it works.”

He stowed the last of the wires, insulated the joins heavily, and lowered the lid of the cabinet, locking it securely and tossing the key to Petrofsky.

“So, Comrade Ross, there it is. You can wheel it on the dolly and put it in the rear of the hatchback, and it will not be damaged. You can drive where you wish—the vibration will not disturb it. One last thing. The yellow button, here, if pushed firmly, will start the timer, but it will not complete the electrical circuit. The timer will do that two hours later.

Press this yellow button and you have two hours to get the hell out. The red button is a manual override. Press that and you get instant detonation.”

He did not know he was wrong. He really believed what he had been told. Only four men in Moscow knew that both buttons were set for instant detonation. It was now evening.

“Now, friend Ross, I want to eat, drink a little, sleep well, and go home tomorrow morning. If that is all right with you.”

“Sure,” said Petrofsky. “Let’s get the cabinet into the corner here, between the sideboard and the drinks table. Help yourself to a whisky, and I’ll rustle up some supper.”

They set off for Heathrow in Petrofsky’s small car at ten the next morning. At a place southwest of Colchester where the dense woods come close to the road, Petrofsky stopped the car and got out to relieve himself. Seconds later, Vassiliev heard a sharp cry of alarm and ran to investigate. The assembler ended his life with an expertly broken neck behind a screen of trees. The body, stripped of all identification, was laid in a shallow ditch and covered with fresh branches. It would probably be discovered in a day or so, maybe later. Police inquiries would eventually involve a photograph in the local papers, which Petrofsky’s neighbor Armitage might or might not see, and might or might not recognize. It would be too late, anyway. Petrofsky drove back to Ipswich.

He had no qualms. His orders had been quite clear on the matter of the assembler. How Vassiliev had ever thought he would be allowed to go home, Petrofsky could not imagine. In any case, he had other problems. Everything was ready, but time was short.

He had visited Rendlesham Forest and picked his spot; in dense cover but hardly a hundred yards from the perimeter wire of the USAF base at Bentwaters. There would be no one there at four in the morning when he pressed the yellow button to initiate detonation for six o’clock. Fresh branches would cover the cabinet while the minutes ticked away and he drove hard toward London.

The only thing he did not know was which morning it would be. The signal to go operational would, he knew, come on the Radio Moscow English-language-service news at ten o’clock of the preceding evening. It would be in the form of a deliberate word-fluff by the broadcaster in the first news item. But since Vassiliev could not tell them, Petrofsky still had to inform Moscow that all was in readiness. This meant a last message by radio. After that, the Stephanides brothers would be expendable. In the dusk of a warm June evening he left Cherryhayes Close and drove sedately north toward Thetford and his motorcycle. At nine o’clock, having changed clothes and vehicles, he began to ride northwest into the British Midlands.

The boredom of an ordinary evening for the watchers in the second-floor-front bedroom of the Royston house was broken at just after ten when Len Stewart came on the air from the police station.

“John, one of my lads was eating in the kebab place just now. The phone rang twice, then the caller hung up. It rang again twice, and he hung up again. Then he did it a third time. The listeners confirm it.”

“Did the Greeks try to answer it?”

“They didn’t reach it in time the first occasion it rang.

After that, they didn’t try for it. Just went on serving. … Hold on. ... John, are you there?”

“Yes, of course.”

“My people outside report one of the brothers is leaving. Through the back. He’s going for his car.”

“Two cars and four men to follow,” ordered Preston. “Remaining two to stay with the restaurant. The runner may be leaving town.”

But he was not. Andreas Stephanides drove back to Compton Street, parked the car, and let himself in. Lights went on behind the curtains. Nothing else happened. At eleven-twenty, earlier than usual, Spiridon closed the restaurant and walked home, arriving at a quarter to twelve.

Preston’s tiger came just before the hour of midnight. The street was very quiet.

Almost all the lights were out. Preston had scattered his four cars and their crews far and wide, and nobody saw him come. The first they knew, there was a mutter from one of Stewart’s men.

“There’s a man at the top end of Compton Street, junction of Cross Street.”

“Doing?” asked Preston.

“Nothing. Standing motionless in the shadows.”

“Wait.”

It was pitch-dark in the Roystons’ upstairs bedroom. The curtains were back, the men standing away from the window. Mungo crouched behind the camera, which was wearing its infrared lens. Preston held his small radio close to one ear. Stewart’s team of six and Burkinshaw’s two drivers with their cars were out there somewhere, all linked by radio.

A door opened down the street as someone put a cat out. It closed again.

“He’s moving,” the radio muttered. “Down toward you. Slowly.”

“Got him,” hissed Ginger, who was at one of the side windows. “Medium height and build. Dark, long raincoat.”

“Mungo, can you get him under that streetlight, just before the Greeks’ house?” asked Burkinshaw.

Mungo turned the lens a fraction. “I’m focused on the pool of light,” he said.

“He’s got ten yards to go,” said Ginger.

Without a sound the figure in the raincoat entered the glow cast by the streetlamp.

Mungo’s camera threw off five fast exposures. The man passed out of the light and arrived at the gate to the Stephanides house. He went up the short path and tapped, instead of ringing, at the door. It opened at once. There was no light in the hall. The dark raincoat passed inside. The door closed.

In the Roystons’ bedroom the tension broke.

“Mungo, get that film out of there and over to the police lab. I want it developed and passed straight to Scotland Yard. Immediate transmission to Charles and Sentinel. I’ll tell them to be ready to try to get a make.”

Something was bothering Preston. Something about the way the man had walked. It was a warm night—why a raincoat? To keep dry? The sun had shone all day. To cover something? Pale clothing, distinctive clothing?

“Mungo, what was he wearing? You saw him in close-up.”

Mungo was halfway out the door. “A raincoat,” he said. “Dark. Long.”

“Under that.”

Ginger whistled. “Boots. I remember them now. Ten inches of jackboot.”

“Shit, he’s on a motorcycle,” said Preston. He spoke into the radio. “Everyone out on the streets. On foot only. No car engines. Every street in the district except Compton.

We’re looking for a motorcycle with a warm engine block.”

The problem is, he thought, I don’t know how long he’s going to be in there. Five minutes? Ten? Sixty? He radioed Len Stewart.

“Len, John here. If we get that motorcycle, I want a bleeper in it somewhere.

Meanwhile, call up Superintendent King. He’ll have to mount the operation. When Chummy leaves, we’ll be after him. Harry’s team and me. I want you and your boys to stay on the Greeks. When we are all one hour clear, the police can take the house and the Greeks.”

Len Stewart, inside the police station, assented and started to phone Superintendent King at home.

It was twenty minutes before one of the roving team found the motorcycle. He reported to Preston, still at the Royston house.

“There’s a big BMW, top end of Queen Street. Carrier box behind the pillion, locked.

Two saddlebags either side of the rear wheel, unlocked. Engine and exhaust still warm.”

“Registration number?”

The number was given him. He passed it to Len Stewart at the police station. Stewart asked for an immediate make on it. It turned out to be a Suffolk number, registered to a Mr. James Duncan Ross of Dorchester.

“It’s either a stolen vehicle, a false plate, or a blind address,” muttered Preston. Hours later, the Dorchester police established it was the last of the three.

The man who had found the motorcycle was ordered to plant the direction-finder in one of the saddlebags, switch it on, and get well away from the vehicle. The man, Joe, was one of Burkinshaw’s two drivers. He went back to his car, effaced himself behind the steering wheel, and confirmed that the bleeper was functioning.

“Okay,” said Preston, “we’re doing a changeover. All drivers back to their cars. Three of Len Stewart’s men, move toward the West Street rear entrance to our observation post and relieve us. One by one, quietly, and now,” To the men around him in the room he said, “Harry, pack up. You go first. Take the lead car. I’ll ride with you. Barney, Ginger, take the backup car. If Mungo can make it back in time, he’ll be with me.”

One by one, Stewart’s men arrived to replace Burkinshaw’s team. Preston prayed that the agent across the road would not move out while the changeover was taking place. He was the last to leave, putting his head around the door of the Roystons’ bedroom to thank them for their help and assure them it would all be over by dawn. The whispers that came back were more than a little worried.

Preston slipped through the back garden and into West Street, and five minutes later joined Burkinshaw and Joe, the driver, in their lead car, parked on Foljambe Road.

Ginger and Barney reported in from the second car, at the top end of Marsden Street, off the Saltergate.

“Of course,” said Burkinshaw gloomily, “if it’s not the motorcycle, we’re up shit creek without a paddle.”

Preston was in the back seat. Beside the driver, Burkinshaw watched the display panel of the console in front of him. Like a small radar screen, it showed a flashing pulse of light at rhythmic intervals, glowing on a quadrant that gave its direction from the end-to-end axis of the car in which they were sitting and its approximate distance from them—

half a mile. The second car carried an identical device, enabling the two operators to get a crossbearing if they wished.

“It’s got to be the motorcycle,” said Preston desperately. “We’d never be able to tail him in these streets, anyway. They’re too empty and he’s too good.”

“He’s leaving.”

The sudden bark from the radio cut off further talk. Stewart’s men in the Roystons’

bedroom reported that the man in the raincoat had left the house across the street. They confirmed that he was walking up Compton Street toward Cross Street and in the direction of the BMW. Then he passed out of sight. Two minutes later one of Stewart’s drivers, on St. Margaret’s Drive, reported that the agent had crossed the top of that street, still heading toward Queen Street. Then nothing. Five minutes went by. Preston prayed.

“He’s moving.”

Burkinshaw was jumping up and down in the front seat in excitement, most unusual behavior in this phlegmatic watcher. The flashing blip was slowly cruising across the screen as the motorcycle changed the angle between itself and the car.

“Target on the move,” the second car confirmed.

“Give him a mile, then take off,” said Preston. “Start engines now.”

The blip moved south and east through the center of Chesterfield. When it was close to the Lordsmill roundabout the cars began to follow. When they reached the roundabout there was no doubt. The signal from the motorcycle was steady and strong, straight down the A617 to Mansfield and Newark. Range: just over a mile. Even their lights would be out of sight of the motorcyclist ahead. Joe grinned. “Try and shake us now, you bastard,” he remarked.

Preston would have been happier if the man ahead had been in a car. Motorcycles were brutes to follow. Fast and maneuverable, they could weave through dense traffic that blocked a tailing car and dive down narrow alleys or between bollards that no car could enter. Even out in the country they could leave the road and ride over grassland where a car would be hard put to follow. The essence was to keep the man ahead unaware that they were following.

The motorcyclist up ahead was good. He stayed within the speed limit, but seldom went below it, taking the curves without slackening speed. He kept to the A617 beneath the sweep of the M1 motorway, through Mansfield, asleep in the small hours of the morning, and on toward Newark. Derbyshire gave way to the fat, rich farmland of Nottinghamshire and he never slackened pace.

Just before Newark he stopped.

“Range closing fast,” said Joe suddenly.

“Douse lights, pull over,” snapped Preston.

In fact, Petrofsky had swerved into a side road, killed his engine and lights, and now sat at the junction staring back the way he had come. A big truck thundered past him and vanished toward Newark. Nothing else. A mile up the road the two watcher cars held station at the roadside. Petrofsky stayed still for five minutes, then gunned his engine and went off down the road to the southeast. When they saw the flashing light on the console move away, the watchers followed, always keeping at least a mile behind.

The chase ran over the River Trent, where the lights of the huge sugar refinery glowed away to their right, then into Newark itself. It was just short of three o’clock. Inside the town, the signal wavered wildly as the pursuer car swerved through the streets. The blip seemed to settle on the A46 toward Lincoln, and the cars were half a mile up that road before Joe slammed on the brakes.

“He’s away to our right,” he said. “Distance increasing.”

“Turn back,” said Preston. They found the turnoff inside Newark; the target had gone down the A17, southeast again, toward Sleaford.

In Chesterfield the police operation moved on the Stephanides house at two-fifty-five.

There were ten uniformed officers and two Special Branch men in plainclothes. Ten minutes earlier and they would have had the two Soviet agents cold. It was just bad luck.

At the moment the Special Branch men approached the door, it opened.

The Stephanides brothers were apparently preparing to leave in their car with their radio to make the transmission that was encoded and recorded inside the transmitter.

Andreas was coming out to start their car when he saw the policemen. Spiridon was behind him, carrying the transmitter. Andreas gave a single yell of alarm, stepped back, and slammed the door. The police charged, shoulders first.

When the door came down, Andreas was behind and under it. He came up fighting like an animal in the narrow hallway, and it took two officers to flatten him again.

The Special Branch men stepped over the melee, had a quick glance through the first-floor rooms, called to the two men in the back garden, who had seen no one emerge, and ran up the stairs. The bedrooms were empty. They found Spiridon in the tiny attic beneath the eaves. The transmitter was on the floor; it was plugged into a wall socket, and a small red light on the console glowed. Spiridon came quietly.

At Menwith Hill the GCHQ listening post intercepted a single squirt from the covert transmitter and logged it at two-fifty-eight on the morning of Thursday, June 11. Triangulation was immediate and pointed to a spot in the western end of the town of Chesterfield. The police station there was alerted at once and the call was patched through to the car being used by Superintendent Robin King. He took the call and told Menwith Hill, “I know. We’ve got them.”

In Moscow, the warrant officer radio operator removed his headphones and nodded toward the teleprinter. “Faint but clear,” he said.

The printer began to chatter, sending out a screed of paper covered with a jumble of meaningless letters. When it fell silent, the officer beside the radio tore off the sheet and fed it through the decoder, already set to the formula of the agreed one-time pad. The decoder absorbed the sheet, its computer ran through the permutations, and it delivered the message in clear. The officer read the text and smiled. He telephoned a number, identified himself, checked the identity of the man he was addressing, and said: “Aurora is ‘go.’ ”

After Newark the countryside flattened and the wind increased. The pursuit entered the gently rolling woods of Lincolnshire and the arrow-straight roads that lead into the fen country. The flashing blip was steady and strong, leading Preston’s two cars down the A17 past Sleaford and toward the Wash and the county of Norfolk.

Southeast of Sleaford, Petrofsky stopped again and scanned the dark horizon behind him for lights. There were none. A mile behind him the pursuers waited in darkened silence. When the blip began to move up the oscilloscope screen, they followed again.

At the village of Sutterton there was another moment of confusion. Two roads led out of the far side of the sleeping township; the A16, due south for Spalding, and the A17, southeast for Long Sutton and King’s Lynn, across the border in Norfolk. It took two minutes to discern that the flashing blip was moving down the A17, toward Norfolk. The gap had increased to three miles.

“Close up,” ordered Preston, and Joe kept the speedometer needle on ninety until the gap was reduced to a mile and a half.

South of King’s Lynn they crossed the spread of the River Ouse, and seconds later the blip took the road due south from the bypass toward Downham Market and Thetford.

“Where the hell’s he going?” grumbled Joe.

“He’s got a base down there somewhere,” said Preston from behind him. “Just keep tracking.”

To their left a flush of pink dusted the eastern horizon, and the silhouettes of the passing trees became clearer. Joe went from headlights to sidelights.

Far to the south, the lights were also dimmed on the columns of buses that growled on choked roads through the Suffolk market town of Bury St. Edmunds. There were two hundred of them, converging from a variety of different directions across the country, packed to the windows with peace marchers. Other demonstrators came in cars, on motorcycles and bicycles, and on foot. The slow cavalcade, hung with its banners and placards, moved out of the town and up the A143 to come to rest at Ixworth junction. The buses could go no farther down the narrow lanes. They stopped on the verge of the main road close to the junction and discharged their yawning cargoes into the brightening dawn of the Suffolk countryside. The marshals then began to urge and cajole the throng into some semblance of a column while the Suffolk police sat astride their motorcycles and watched.

In London, the lights were still burning. Sir Bernard Hemmings had been driven from his home, having been alerted, as he had requested, when the watcher teams in Chesterfield began to follow their man. He was in the basement radio room at Cork Street, with Brian Harcourt-Smith beside him.

Across the city, Sir Nigel Irvine, also roused at his own request, was in his office at Sentinel House. Beneath him, in the basement, Blodwyn had sat for half the night and stared at the face of a man beneath a streetlamp in a small Derbyshire town. She had been driven from her Camden Town home in the small hours, and had agreed to come only at the personal request of Sir Nigel himself. He had greeted her with flowers; for him she would walk over broken glass, but for no one else.

“He’s never been here before,” Blodwyn had said as soon as she set eyes on the photograph, “and yet ...”

After an hour it was to the Middle East that she turned her attention, and at four in the morning she had him. It was a contribution from the Israeli Mossad; it was six years old, a bit blurred, and only the one picture. Even the Mossad had not been sure; the accompanying text made plain it was just a suspicion.

One of their men had taken the photograph on the streets of Damascus. The subject had called himself Timothy Donnelly then, and represented himself as a salesman for Waterford crystal. On a hunch the Mossad had snapped him and checked with their people in Dublin. Timothy Donnelly existed, but he was not in Damascus. By the time this was learned, the man in the picture had vanished. He had never surfaced again.

“That’s him,” Blodwyn said. “The ears prove it. He should have worn a hat.’

Sir Nigel called the basement radio room at Cork Street. “We think we have a make, Bernard,” he said. “We can run you off a print and send it over.”

They almost lost him six miles south of King’s Lynn. The pursuit cars were heading south to Downham Market when the blip began to drift, imperceptibly at first, then more definitely, toward the east. Preston consulted his road map.

“He turned off back there onto the A134,” he said. “Heading for Thetford. Take a left here.”

They got on the tail again at Stradsett, and then it was a straight run through the thickening forests of beech, oak, and pine to Thetford. They had reached the top of Gallows Hill and could see the ancient market town spread out ahead of them in the dim light of dawn when Joe slewed to a halt.

“He’s stopped again.”

Another check for a tail? He had always done that in open countryside before.

“Where is he?”

Joe studied the range indicator and pointed ahead. “Right in the heart of the town, John.”

Preston conned the map. Apart from the road they were on, there were five others leading out of Thetford in the configuration of a star. The daylight was growing. It was five o’clock. Preston yawned. “We’ll give him ten.”

The blip never moved for ten minutes, or another five. Preston sent his second car around the ring road. From four points the second car triangulated with the first; the blip was right in the center of Thetford. Preston picked up the hand mike.

“Okay, I think we have his base. We’re moving in.”

The two cars closed on the center of town. They converged on Magdalen Street, and at five-twenty-five found the hollow square of garages. Joe maneuvered the nose of the car until it pointed unswervingly at one of the doors. The tension among the men began to mount.

“He’s in there,” said Joe. Preston climbed out. He was joined by Barney and Ginger from the other car.

“Ginger, can you lose that door handle?”

For answer Ginger took a crowbar from the toolkit in one of the cars, slipped it over the garage door handle and jerked it sharply. There was a crack inside the lock. He looked at Preston, who nodded. Ginger swept the up-and-over garage door open and stood hastily back.

The men in the yard could only stare. The motorcycle was positioned on its stand in the center of the garage. From a hook hung a set of black leathers and a crash helmet. A pair of jackboots stood near the wall. In the dust and oil on the floor were the tracks of automobile tires.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Harry Burkinshaw, “it’s a switch.”

Joe leaned out of his window. “Cork just came on the police network. They say they have a full-face picture. Where do you want it sent?”

“Thetford police station,” said Preston. He gazed up at the clear blue sky above him.

“But it’s too late,” he whispered.

Chapter 21

At just after five that morning, the marchers were finally in a column that was seven men abreast and more than a mile long. The head of the column began to move up the narrow road from Ixworth junction called the A1088, their destination the village of Little Fakenham and thence down the even narrower lane to the Royal Air Force base at Honington.

It was a bright, sunny morning and they were all in good spirits, despite the early hour that had been decreed by the organizers so as to catch the first arrival of the American Galaxy transports bringing in the Cruise missiles. As the head of the column began to surge between the hedgerows flanking the road, the body of the crowd started the ritual chant: “No to Cruise—Yanks out.”

Years earlier,” RAF Honington had been a base for Tornado strike bombers and had attracted no attention from the nation as a whole. It was left to the villagers of Little Fakenham, Honington, and Sapiston to tolerate the howling of the Tornadoes over their heads. The decision to create at Honginton Britain’s third Cruise missile base had changed all that.

The Tornadoes had gone to Scotland, but in their place the peace of the rustic neighborhood had been shattered by protesters, mainly female and possessed of strange personal habits, who had infested the fields and set up shanty camps on patches of common land. That had been going on for two years.

There had been marching demonstrations before, but this was to be the biggest.

Newsmen and television reporters were in heavy attendance, the cameramen running backward up the road to film the dignitaries in the front rank of the column. These included three members of the Shadow Cabinet, two bishops, a monsignor, various luminaries of the reformed churches, five trade-union leaders, and two noted academics.

Behind them came the pacifists, conscientious objectors, clerics, Quakers, students, pro-Soviet Marxist-Leninists, anti-Soviet Trotskyites, lecturers, and Labour activists, with an admixture of unemployed workers, punks, gays, and bearded ecologists. There were also hundreds of equally concerned housewives, workingmen, teachers, and schoolchildren.

Along the sides of the road were scattered the resident female protesters, most sporting placards and banners, some in anoraks and crewcuts, who held hands with their younger lady friends or applauded the approaching marchers. The whole column was preceded by two policemen on motorcycles.

By five-fifteen Valeri Petrofsky was clear of Thetford and as usual was motoring sedately south down the A1088 to pick up the main road to Ipswich and home. He had been up all night and he was tired. But he knew his message must have been sent by three-thirty; by now Moscow would know that he had not let them down.

He crossed the border into Suffolk near Euston Hall and noted a police motorcyclist astride his stationary machine at the side of the road. It was the wrong road and the wrong hour; Petrofsky had driven along this road many times over the previous months and he had never seen a motorcycle patrolman on it.

A mile farther on, at Little Fakenham, all his animal senses went to full alert. Two white Rover police cars were parked on the northern side of the village. Beside them a group of senior officers were in consultation with two more motorcycle patrolmen. They glanced up at him as he drove by, but made no move to stop him.

The move came later, at Ixworth Thorpe. Petrofsky had just cleared the village itself and was approaching its church on the right-hand side when he saw the motorcycle leaning against the hedge and the figure of the patrolman in the center of the road, a radio held to his mouth and an arm raised to stop him. He began to slow, his right hand dropping to the map pocket inside the door panel where, under a rolled woolen sweater, lay the Finnish automatic.

If it was a trap, he was boxed from behind. But the policeman seemed to be alone.

There was no one else nearby. Petrofsky slowed to a halt. The towering figure in black vinyl strolled to the car window and bent down. Petrofsky found himself confronting a ruddy Suffolk face with no hint of guile in it.

“Could I ask you to pull over to the side of the road, please, sir? Just there in front of the church. Then you’ll come to no ’arm.”

So it was a trap. The threat was thinly veiled. But why was there no one else about?

“What seems to be the trouble, Officer?”

“ ’Fraid the road’s blocked a bit farther down, sir. We’ll have it clear directly.”

Truth or trick? There might be an overturned tractor down there. He decided not to shoot the policeman and make a dash for it. Not yet. He nodded, let in the clutch, and pulled over in front of the church. Then he waited. In his rearview mirror he could see the policeman taking no more notice of him, but signaling another motorist to stop. This could be it, he thought. Counterintelligence. But there was only one man in the other car.

It pulled up behind him. The man climbed out.

“What’s going on?” he called to the policeman. Petrofsky could hear them through his open window.

“Ain’t you ’eard, sir? It’s the demonstration. Been in all the papers. And on the telly.”

“Oh, hell,” said the other driver, “I didn’t realize it was this road. Or at this hour.”

“They won’t take long to pass,” said the policeman comfortingly. “No more ’n an hour.”

At that moment the head of the column came into sight from around the bend. With disgust and contempt, Petrofsky gazed at the distant banners and heard the faint shouts.

He climbed out to watch.

The hollow square of tarmac off Magdalen Street with its thirty garages was becoming crowded. Minutes after the discovery of the abandoned motorcycle, Preston had sent Barney and the second car racing up Grove Lane to the police station to ask for help.

There had been a duty constable in the front office at that hour, and a sergeant having tea in the back.

Simultaneously Preston had called London on the police network, and even though it was an open circuit and he would normally have used the cover parlance of a car-rental agent, he threw caution to the winds and spoke in clear to Sir Bernard himself.

“I need backup from the police forces of Norfolk and Suffolk,” he said. “Also a chopper, sir. Very fast. Or it’s all over.” He had spent the last twenty minutes studying the large-scale road map of East Anglia, spread on the hood of Joe’s car.

After five minutes a Thetford motorcycle patrolman, raised by his station sergeant, drifted into the yard, shut off his engine, and parked his bike. He walked over to Preston, easing off his helmet as he did so. “You the gentlemen from London?” he asked.

“Anything I can do to help?”

“Not unless you’re a magician,” sighed Preston.

Barney arrived back from the police station. “Here’s the photograph, John. Came through while I was talking to the duty sergeant.”

Preston studied the handsome young face photographed on a Damascus street. “You bastard,” he muttered. His words were drowned, so no one else heard. Two American F-111 strike bombers raced across the sky in tight formation, low, heading east. The howl of their engines broke the calm of the waking borough. The policeman did not glance up.

Barney, standing beside Preston, followed their progress out of sight. “Noisy sods,” he remarked.

“Ah, they always be coming over Thetford,” said the local cop. “Hardly notice them after a while. Come from Lakenheath.”

“London Airport’s bad enough,” said Barney, who lived at Hounslow, “but at least the airliners don’t fly that low. Don’t think I could live with that for long.”

“Don’t mind ’em, just so long as they stay up in the air,” said the policeman, unwrapping a chocolate bar. “Wouldn’t like one to crash, though. They carry atomic bombs, they do. Small, mind.”

Preston turned around slowly. “What did you say?” he asked.

At Cork Street, MI5 had been working fast. Dispensing with the usual liaison from the legal adviser, Sir Bernard Hemmings had personally called both the assistant commissioners (crime) for the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. The officer in Norwich was still abed, but in Ipswich his opposite number was already in his office because of the demonstration that was tying up half the Suffolk force.

The assistant commissioner for Norfolk was reached at the same time as the call to him from Thetford police station came through. He authorized complete cooperation; the paperwork could follow later.

Brian Harcourt-Smith was chasing up a helicopter. Britain’s two intelligence agencies have access to a special flight of helicopters, which are held at Northolt, outside London.

It is possible to call one up in a hurry, but normally advance arrangements are made. The Deputy Director-General’s urgent inquiry brought the answer that a chopper could be airborne in forty minutes and could land at Thetford forty minutes after that. Harcourt-Smith asked Northolt to hold on. “Eighty minutes,” he reported to Sir Bernard.

The DG happened to be talking to the assistant commissioner for Suffolk, who was in his Ipswich office. “Would you have a police helicopter available? Right now?” he asked the officer.

There was a pause while the ACC for Suffolk consulted his colleague in traffic control on an internal line. “We have one in the air over Bury St. Edmunds,” he said.

“Please get it to Thetford and take aboard one of our officers,” said Sir Bernard. “It’s a matter of national security, I assure you.”

“I’ll give the order now,” said the ACC for Suffolk.

Preston beckoned the Thetford policeman over to his car. “Point out the American airbases around here,” he said.

The patrolman put a thick finger on the road map. “Well, they’re a bit all over, sir.

There’s Sculthorpe up here in north Norfolk, Lakenheath and Mildenhall out here to the west, Chicksands in Bedfordshire—though I do believe they don’t fly out of there anymore. And then there’s Bentwaters, here on the Suffolk coast, near Wood-bridge.”

It was six o’clock. The marchers swirled around the two cars parked in front of the Church of All Saints, a tiny but beautiful building, as old as the village, thatched with Norfolk reed and without electric light, so that evensong was still held by candlelight.

Petrofsky stood by his car, arms crossed, his face bland, watching them amble by. His private thoughts were venomous. Across the fields behind him, a traffic control helicopter clattered north, but he failed to hear it for the chanting of the marchers.

The driver of the other car, who turned out to be a biscuit salesman returning home from a seminar on the sales appeal of Butter Osbornes, walked over to him. He nodded toward the marchers. “Arseholes,” he muttered above the chant of “No to Cruise—Yanks out.” The Russian smiled and nodded. Getting no verbal reaction, the salesman wandered back to his own car, climbed in, and began to read his stack of promotional literature.

If Valeri Petrofsky had had a more developed sense of humor, he might have smiled at his situation. He was standing in front of the church of a God in whom he did not believe, in a country he was seeking to destroy, giving passage to people he heartily despised.

And yet, if his mission was successful, all the marchers’ demands would be fulfilled. He sighed as he thought of the speedy way his own country’s MVD troops would deal with this march before handing over the ringleaders to the lads in the Fifth Chief Directorate for an extended question-and-answer session down at Lefortovo.

Preston stared down at the map on which he had circled the five American airbases. If I were an illegal, living in a foreign country under deep cover and on a mission, he thought, I would want to hide myself in a large town or city.

In Norfolk there were King’s Lynn, Norwich, and Yarmouth. In Suffolk, Lowestoft, Bury St. Edmunds, Colchester, and Ipswich. To get back to King’s Lynn, close to USAF

Sculthorpe, the man he was chasing would have driven back past him on Gallows Hill.

No one had. That left four bases, three away to the west and one in the south.

He considered the line of the ride that had brought his quarry from Chesterfield to Thetford. Due southeast, all the way. It would be logical to site the point for switching from motorcycle to car somewhere along the line of travel. From Lakenheath and Mildenhall to the transmitter house at Chesterfield, it would have been more logical to rent a garage in Ely or Peterborough, en route to the Midlands.

He took the line southeast from the Midlands to Thetford and extended it farther southeast. It pointed directly at Ipswich. Twelve miles from Ipswich, in a dense forest and close to the shore, was Bentwaters. He recalled from somewhere that they flew F-5s out of there, modern strike bombers with tactical nukes, designed to halt an onslaught by twenty-nine thousand massed tanks.

Behind him the policeman’s radio set crackled into life. The man walked over and answered the call. “There’s a helicopter coming up from the south,” he reported.

“It’s for me,” Preston said.

“Oh ... ah ... where do you want it to land?”

“Is there a flat area nearby?” asked Preston.

“Place we call the Meadows,” said the patrolman. “Down Castle Street by the roundabout. Should be dry enough.”

“Tell him to go down there,” said Preston. “I’ll meet him.” He called to his team, some of whom were dozing in the cars. “Everybody in. We’re going down to the Meadows.”

As they piled into the two cars Preston took his map over to the patrolman. “Tell me. If you were here in Thetford and driving to Ipswich, which way would you go?”

Without hesitation the police motorcyclist pointed to a spot on the map. “I’d take the A1088 straight down to Ixworth, over the junction, and on down to cut into the A45 main road to Ipswich, here at Elmswell village.”

Preston nodded. “So would I. Let’s hope Chummy thinks the same. I want you to stay here and try to trace any other garage tenant who might have seen the missing man’s car.

I need that license-plate number.”

The light Bell helicopter was waiting in the Meadows, by the roundabout. Preston climbed out of the car, taking a portable radio with him.

“Stay here,” he told Harry Burkinshaw. “It’s a long shot. He’s probably miles away—

he’s got at least a fifty-minute start. I’ll go as far as Ipswich and see if I can spot anything. If not, it’s up to that license-plate number. Someone may have seen it. If the Thetford police trace anyone who did, I’ll be up there.”

He ducked under the whirling rotors and climbed into the narrow cabin, showed his ID

card to the pilot, and nodded to the traffic controller, who had squeezed into the back.

“That was fast,” he shouted to the pilot.

“I was airborne already,” the pilot shouted back.

The helicopter lifted off and climbed away from Thetford.

“Where do you want to go?” the pilot asked.

“Down the A1088.”

“Want to see the demo, eh?”

“What demo?”

The pilot looked at him as if he had just arrived from Mars. The chopper, nose down, whirled southeast with the line of the A1088 to starboard so that Preston could see the line of marchers.

“The RAF Honington demo,” the pilot said. “It’s been in all the papers and on TV.”

Preston, of course, had seen the news coverage of the projected demonstration against the base. He had spent two weeks watching television in Chesterfield. He had just not realized that the base lay down the A1088 between Thetford and Ixworth. In thirty seconds he could see the real thing.

Away to his right the morning sun glinted on the runways of the airbase. A giant American Galaxy transport was taxiing round the perimeter after landing. Outside the base’s several gates were the black unes of Suffolk policemen, hundreds of them, backs to the wire, facing the demonstrators.

From the swelling crowd in front of the police cordon, a dark line of marchers, banners flapping and waving above their heads, ran back down the access lane to the A1088, debouched onto that road, and ran southeast toward Ixworth junction.

Straight below him he could look down at Little Fakenham village, with Honington village swimming into view. He could make out the barns of Honington Hall and the red brick of Malting Row across the road. Here the marchers were at their thickest as they swirled around the entrance to the narrow lane leading to the base. His heart gave a thump.

Up the road from the center of Honington village there was a line of cars backed up for half a mile—all drivers who had not realized that the road would be blocked for part of the early morning, or who had hoped to get through in time. There were more than a hundred vehicles.

Farther down, right in the heart of the marching column, he could see the glint of two or three car roofs; evidently they belonged to drivers who had been allowed through just before the road was closed but who had not made Ixworth junction in time to avoid being trapped. There were some in Ixworth Thorpe village and two parked near a small church farther on.

“I wonder,” he whispered.

Valeri Petrofsky saw the policeman who had originally stopped him strolling in his direction. The marching column had thinned a bit; it was the tail end that was passing now.

“Sorry it’s taken so long, sir. Seems there were more of them than foreseen.”

Petrofsky shrugged amiably. “Can’t be helped, Officer. I was a fool to try it. Thought I’d get through in time.”

“Ah, there’s quite a few motorists been caught by it all. Won’t be long now. About ten minutes for the marchers, then there’s a few big broadcast vans bringing up the tail. Soon as they’re past, we’ll open the road again.”

Across the fields in front of them a police helicopter went past in a wide circle. In its open doorway Petrofsky could see the traffic controller talking into his handset.

“Harry, can you hear me? Come in, Harry, it’s John.” Preston was sitting in the doorway of the chopper over Ixworth Thorpe, trying to raise Burkinshaw.

The watcher’s voice came back, scratchy and tinny, from Thetford. “Harry here. Read you, John.”

“Harry, there’s an anti-Cruise demonstration going on down here. There’s a chance, just a chance, that Chummy got caught up in it. Hold on.” He turned to the pilot. “How long’s that been going on?”

“ ’Bout an hour.”

“When did they close the road at Ixworth down there?”

From the rear, the traffic officer leaned forward. “Five-twenty,” he said.

Preston glanced at his watch. Six-twenty-five. “Harry, get the hell down the A134 to Bury St. Edmunds, pick up the A45, and meet me at the junction of the 1088 and the 45 at Elmswell. Use the cop up at the garages as an outrider. And Harry, tell Joe to drive like never in his life.” He tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Take me to Elmswell and set me down in a field near the road junction.”

By air it took only five minutes. As they passed over Ixworth junction, across the A143

Preston could see the long, snaking column of buses parked on the verge, the ones that had brought the bulk of the marchers to this picturesque and sylvan part of the countryside. Two minutes later he could make out the broad A45 running from Bury St.

Edmunds to Ipswich.

The pilot banked into a turn, looking for a landing spot. There were meadows near the point where the narrow, lanelike A1088 debouched into the sweep of the A45.

“They could be water meadows,” shouted the pilot. “I’ll hover. You can jump from a couple of feet.”

Preston nodded. He turned to the traffic controller, who was in uniform. “Grab your cap. You’re coming with me.”

“That’s not my job,” protested the sergeant, “I’m traffic control.”

“That’s what I want you for. Come on, let’s go.”

He jumped the two feet from the step of the Bell into thick, tall grass. The police sergeant, holding his flat cap against the draft of the rotors, followed him. The pilot lifted away and turned toward Ipswich and his base.

With Preston in the lead, the pair plodded across the meadow, climbed the fence, and dropped onto the A1088. A hundred yards away it joined the A45. Across the junction they could see the unending stream of traffic heading toward Ipswich.

“Now what?” asked the police sergeant.

“Now you stand here and stop cars coming south down this road. Ask the drivers if they have been on the road from as far north as Honington. If they joined this road south of Ixworth junction, or at it, let ’em go. Tell me when you get the first one to have come through the demonstration

Then Preston walked down to the A45 and looked to the right, toward Bury St. Edmunds. “Come on, Harry. Come on.”

The cars coming south stopped for the police uniform in their path, but all averred that they had joined the road south of the antinuclear demonstration. Twenty minutes later, Preston saw the Thetford motorcycle patrolman, siren wailing to clear a path, racing toward him, followed by the two watcher cars. They all screeched to a halt at the entrance to the A1088. The policeman raised his visor.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, sir. I don’t reckon that journey’s ever been done faster. There’s going to be questions.”

Preston thanked him and ordered both his cars a few yards up the narrow secondary road. He pointed to a grassy bank. “Joe, ram it.”

“Do what?”

“Ram it. Not hard enough to wreck the car. Just make it look good.”

The two policemen stared in amazement as Joe forced his car into the bank by the road.

The car’s rear end stuck out, blocking half the freeway.

Preston directed the other car to move fifteen yards farther up. “Okay, out,” he ordered the driver. “Come on, lads, all together, now. Heave it onto its side.”

It took seven shoves before the MI5 car rolled over. Taking a rock from the hedgerow, Preston smashed a side window on Joe’s car, scooped up handfuls of the crystalline fragments, and scattered them across the road.

“Ginger, lie on the road, here, near Joe’s car. Barney, get a blanket from the trunk and put it over him. Right over. Face and all. Okay, the rest of you, over the hedge, and stay out of sight.”

Preston beckoned the two policemen to him. “Sergeant, there’s been a nasty pileup. I want you to stand by the body and direct the traffic past it. Officer, park your bike, walk up the road, and slow down oncoming traffic as it approaches.”

The two policemen had orders from Ipswich and Norwich, respectively. Cooperate with the men from London. Even if they are maniacs.

Preston sat at the base of the grassy bank, a handkerchief pressed to his face as if to stanch blood from a broken nose.

There is nothing like a body by the roadside to slow down drivers, or cause them to stare through the side window as they crawl past. Preston had made sure Ginger’s “body”

was on the driver’s side for cars coming south down the A1088.

Major Valeri Petrofsky was in the seventeenth car. Like the others before it, the modest family hatchback slowed to the patrolman’s flapping hand, then crawled past the crash scene. On the grassy bank, eyes half-closed, the face in the photo in his pocket imprinted on his mind, Preston looked across at the Russian twelve feet away as his sedan swerved slowly past the two cars that almost blocked the road.

From the corner of his eye Preston watched the little hatchback turn left onto the A45, pause for a break in the traffic, and pull into the Ipswich-bound stream. Then he was up and running.

The two drivers and two watchers came back over the hedge at his call. An amazed motorist who was just slowing down saw the “body” leap off the ground and help the others to pull the over-turned car back onto its four wheels, where it landed with a crunch.

Joe climbed behind the wheel of his own car and backed it out of the bank. Barney wiped mud and grass off its headlights before climbing in. Harry Burkinshaw took not one but three strong mints and popped the lot.

Preston approached the motorcycle patrolman. “You’d better get back to Thetford, and many, many thanks for all your help.” To the sergeant on foot he said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you here. Your uniform’s too noticeable for you to come with us. But many thanks for your help.” Then the two MI5 cars swept away toward the A45 and turned left toward Ipswich.

The bewildered motorist who had seen it all asked the abandoned sergeant, “Are they making a film for the telly?”

“I shouldn’t be at all bloody surprised,” said the sergeant. “By the way, sir, can you give me a lift into Ipswich?”

The commercial and commuter traffic into Ipswich was dense, and became thicker as they approached the town. It provided good cover for the two watcher cars, which constantly shifted position so they could alternately keep the hatchback in view.

They came into town past Whitton, but short of the town center the small car up ahead took a right into Chevallier Street and round the ring to the Handford Bridge, where it crossed the River Orwell. South of the river the quarry followed the Ranelagh Road and then took another right.

“He’s heading out of town again,” said Joe, holding station five cars behind the suspect. They were entering Belstead Road, which leaves Ipswich heading south.

Quite suddenly the hatchback pulled to the left and entered a small housing development.

“Steady,” Preston warned Joe, “he mustn’t see us now.”

He told the second car to stay at the junction of the access road and Belstead, in case the quarry came around in a circle and back out again. Joe cruised slowly into the complex of seven cul-de-sacs that make up The Hayes. They went past the entrance to Cherryhayes Close just in time to see the man they were tailing park in front of a small house halfway up the street. The man was now climbing out of his car. Preston ordered Joe to keep going until out of sight, then stop.

“Harry, give me your hat and see if there’s a Conservative rosette in the glove compartment.”

There was—left over from the two weeks when the team had used it to enter and leave the Royston house by the front door without arousing suspicion. Preston pinned it to his jacket, stripped off the raincoat he had worn by the roadside where he had first seen Petrofsky face-to-face, donned Harry’s porkpie hat, and climbed out.

He walked to Cherryhayes Close and strolled up the walk opposite the house of the Soviet agent. Directly facing No. 12 was No. 9. It had a Social Democratic Party poster in the window. He walked to the front door and knocked.

It was opened by a pretty young woman. Preston could hear a child’s voice, then a man’s, inside the house. It was eight o’clock; the family was at breakfast.

Preston raised his hat. “Good morning, madam.”

Seeing his rosette, the woman said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, you’re really wasting your time here. We vote Social Democrat.”

“I perfectly understand, ma’am. But I have a piece of promotional literature which I would be most grateful if you would show to your husband.” He handed her the plastic card that identified him as an officer of MI5.

She did not look at it, but sighed. “Oh, very well. But I’m sure it won’t change anything.”

She left him standing on the doorstep and withdrew into the house; seconds later, Preston heard a whispered conversation from the kitchen in the back. A man came out and walked down the hall, holding the card. A young business executive in dark trousers, white shirt, striped tie. No jacket; that would come when he left for work. He was holding Preston’s card and frowning.

“What on earth’s this?” the householder asked.

“What it seems to be, sir. It’s the identification card of an officer of MI5.”

“It’s not a joke?”

“No, it’s perfectly genuine.”

“I see. Well, what do you want?”

“Would you let me come in and close the door?”

The young man paused for a moment, then nodded. Preston doffed his hat again and stepped over the threshold. He closed the door behind him.

Across the street, Valeri Petrofsky was in his sitting room behind the opaque net curtains. He was tired, and his muscles ached from his long ride. He helped himself to a whisky. Glancing through the curtains, he could see one of the seemingly endless political canvassers talking to the people at No. 9. He had had three himself over the past ten days, and another wad of party literature had been on his doormat when he arrived home. He watched the householder allow the man into his hallway. Another convert, he thought. Fat lot of good it will do them.

Preston sighed with relief. The young man watched him doubtfully while his wife stared from the kitchen door. The face of a small girl of about three appeared around the doorframe at her mother’s knee.

“Are you really from MI5?” asked the man.

“Yes. We don’t have two heads and green ears, you know.”

For the first time the younger man smiled. “No. Of course not. It’s just a surprise. But what do you want with us?”

“Nothing, of course.” Preston grinned. “I don’t even know who you are. My colleagues and I have tailed a man we believe to be a foreign agent, and he has gone into the house across the way. I would like to borrow your phone, and perhaps you would allow a couple of men to observe the suspect from your upstairs bedroom window.”

“Foreign agent?” asked the man. “Jim Ross? He’s not a foreigner.”

“We think he may be. Could I use the phone?”

“Well, yes. I suppose so.” He turned toward his family. “Come on, all back in the kitchen.”

Preston rang Charles Street and was put through to Sir Bernard Hemmings, who was still at Cork. Burkinshaw had already used the police radio net to inform Cork in guarded language that the “client” was at his home in Ipswich and that the “taxis” were in the neighborhood and “on call.”

“Preston?” said the Director-General when he came on the line. “John? Where are you, exactly?”

“A small residential cul-de-sac in Ipswich, called Cherryhayes Close,” said Preston.

“We’ve run Chummy to earth. I’m certain this time it’s his base.”

“Do you think it’s time we moved in?”

“Yes, sir, I do. I fear he may be armed. I think you know what I mean. I don’t think it’s one for Special Branch or the local force.” He told his DG what he wanted, then replaced the receiver and put in a call to Sir Nigel at Sentinel House.

“Yes, John, I agree,” said C when he had been given the same information. “If he’s got with him what we think, it had better be as you ask. The SAS.”

Chapter 22

To call in the Special Air Service, Britain’s elite and multirole regiment of experts at deep penetration, observation, and (occasionally) urban assault, is not so easy as the more adventurous television dramas might suggest.

The SAS never operates on its own initiative. Under the Constitution it can, like any part of the armed forces, operate inside the United Kingdom only in support of the civil authority—that is, the police. Thus, ostensibly the local police remain in overall command of the operation. In reality, once the SAS men have been given the “go” order, the local police are well advised to step smartly back.

Under the law, it is the chief constable of a county in which an emergency has arisen—

an emergency that the local police are deemed not to be able to handle unassisted—who must make a formal request to the Home Office for the SAS to be brought in. It may be that the chief constable is “advised” to make the request, and it is a bold man indeed who refuses to do so if the “advice” comes from high enough.

When the chief constable has made his formal request to the Permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office, the latter passes the request to his opposite number in Defense, who in turn apprises the director of military operations of the request, and the DMO alerts the SAS at its Hereford base camp.

That the procedure can work within minutes is due in part to the fact that it has been rehearsed over and over again and honed to a fine art, and partly to the fact that the British establishment, when required to move fast, contains enough interpersonal relationships to permit a great deal of procedure to be kept at verbal level, with the inevitable paperwork left to catch up later. British bureaucracy may appear slow and cumbersome to the British, but it is greased lightning compared to its European and American counterparts. In any case, most British chief constables have been to Hereford to meet the unit known simply as “the Regiment” and to be shown exactly what kinds of assistance can be put at their disposal if requested. Few have emerged unimpressed.

That morning the chief constable of Suffolk was told from London of the crisis that had been visited on him in the form of a suspected foreign agent, believed to be armed and perhaps with a bomb, who was holed up in Cherryhayes Close, Ipswich. The chief constable contacted Sir Hubert Villiers in Whitehall, where his call was expected. Sir Hubert briefed his minister and his colleague the Cabinet Secretary, who informed the Prime Minister. Downing Street’s assent having been obtained, Sir Hubert passed the by now politically cleared request to Sir Peregrine Jones at Defense, who knew it all, anyway, because he had had a chat with Sir Martin Flannery. Within sixty minutes of the first contact between the head of the Suffolk constabulary and the Home Office, the director of military operations was talking on a scrambled line to the commanding officer of the SAS at Hereford.

The fighting arm of the SAS is based on units of four. Four men make up a patrol, four patrols a troop, and four troops a squadron. The four “saber” squadrons are A, B, D, and G. They rotate through the various SAS commitments: Northern Ireland, the Middle East, jungle training, and special projects, apart from the continuing NATO tasks and the maintenance of one squadron on standby at Hereford.

The commitments tend to last from six to nine months, and that month it was B

Squadron that was based at Hereford. As usual there was one troop on half-hour standby and another at two-hour readiness. The four troops in each squadron are always the air troop (free-fallers), the boat troop (marines trained in canoe and underwater expertise), the mountain troop (climbers), and the mobile troop (in armed Land-Rovers).

When Brigadier Jeremy Cripps finished his call from London, it was to Seven Troop, the free-fall parachute men of B Squadron, that the task fell of going to Ipswich.

“What is your normal routine at this hour?” asked Preston of the Cherryhayes Close householder, whose name was Adrian. The young executive had just finished a phone conversation with the ACC for Suffolk, who was in his office at Ipswich police headquarters. If there had been any lingering doubt in Adrian’s mind as to the authenticity of his unexpected guest of half an hour earlier, it had been dispelled. Preston had suggested that Adrian make the call himself, and the young man was now rightly convinced that the Suffolk police were backing the MI5 officer in his sitting room. He had also been told that the man across the street might be armed and dangerous, and that an arrest would have to be made later in the day.

“Well, I drive to work at about quarter to nine—that’s in ten minutes. At about ten, Lucinda takes Samantha to playschool. She usually does her shopping, picks up Samantha at midday, and returns home. On foot. I get back from work around six-thirty—by car, of course.”

“I’d like you to take the day off work,” said Preston. “Ring your office now and say you are not well. But leave the house at the usual time. You will be met at the top of the road, where Belstead Road joins the access to The Hayes, by a police car.”

“What about my wife and child?”

“I’d like Mrs. Adrian to wait here until the usual hour, then leave with Samantha and shopping basket, walk up there, and join you. Is there any place you can go for the day?”

“There’s my mother at Felixstowe,” said Lucinda Adrian nervously.

“Could you spend the day with her? Perhaps even tonight?”

“What about our house?”

“I assure you, Mr. Adrian, nothing will happen to it,” said Preston optimistically. He might have added it would either be unharmed or, if things went wrong, vaporized. “I must ask you to let me and my colleagues use it as an observation post to watch the man across the way. We will come and go via the back. We will do absolutely no damage.”

“What do you think, darling?” Adrian asked his wife.

She nodded. “I just want to get Samantha out of here,” she said.

“In one hour, I promise you,” said Preston. “We know that Mr. Ross has been up all night because we have been tailing him. He’s probably asleep, and in any case no police move against the house will take place before the afternoon, maybe the early evening.”

“All right,” said Adrian, “we’ll do it.”

He made his call to the office to excuse himself for the day, and drove off at eight-forty-five. From his upstairs bedroom window, Valeri Petrofsky saw him go. The Russian was preparing to catch a few hours’ sleep. There was nothing unusual going on in the street. Adrian always left for work at this hour.

Preston noted that there was an empty lot behind the Adrians’ house. He radioed Harry Burkinshaw and Barney, who came in through the back, nodded to a startled Lucinda Adrian, and went upstairs to adopt again their profession in life—watching. Ginger had found a patch of high ground a quarter of a mile away from which he could see both the estuary of the Orwell, with the docks on its banks, and the small housing development spread out below. With binoculars he could monitor the rear of 12 Cherryhayes Close.

“It backs onto the rear garden of another house, on Brackenhayes,” Ginger told Preston on his radio. “No sign of movement in house or garden. All windows closed— that’s odd in this weather.”

“Keep watching,” said Preston. “I’ll be here. If I have to go, Harry will take over.”

An hour later, Lucinda and Samantha walked calmly out of the house and away.

In the town itself another operation was moving up through the gears. The chief constable, who had risen through the uniformed branch, had handed the details of the pending operation to his assistant, Chief Superintendent Peter Low.

Low had dispatched two detectives to the town hall, where they had elicited the information that the target house was owned by a certain Mr. Johnson but that bills were to be sent to Oxborrows, the real-estate agents. A call to Oxborrows revealed that Mr.

Johnson was away in Saudi Arabia and the house had been rented to a Mr. James Duncan Ross. A second picture of Ross, alias Timothy Donnelly of the streets of Damascus, was telexed to Ipswich and shown to the agent at Oxborrows, who identified the tenant.

The town hall housing department also came up with the names of the architects who had designed the development called The Hayes, and from this partnership were obtained detailed floor plans of the property at 12 Cherryhayes Close. The architects were even more helpful; other houses, identical in design to the last detail, had been built elsewhere in Ipswich, and one was found to be standing empty. It would be useful for the SAS

assault team; they would know the exact geography of the house when they went in.

The other part of Peter Low’s duties was to find a “holding area” for the SAS men to use when they arrived. A holding area has to be private, enclosed, and quickly available, with access for vehicles and telephone communication. An empty warehouse down on Eagle Wharf was traced, and the owner agreed to let the police borrow it for a “training exercise.”

The warehouse had big sliding doors that could open to admit the vehicle convoy and close to keep out prying eyes, a floor area ample enough to accommodate a mock-up of the house in The Hayes, and a small glass-sided office to use as an operations room.

Just before noon an Army Scout helicopter swished into the far side of Ipswich municipal airport and disgorged three men. One was the commanding officer of the SAS

Regiment, Brigadier Cripps; one was the operations officer, a staff major with the Regiment; and the third was the team commander, Captain Julian Lyndhurst. They were all in plainclothes, carried suitcases with their uniforms inside, and were met by an unmarked police car that took them straight to the holding area, where the police were establishing their operational center.

Chief Superintendent Low briefed the three officers to the best of his ability, which was to the limit of what he had been told by London. He had spoken to Preston on the telephone but had not yet met him.

“There’s a John Preston, I understand,” said Brigadier Cripps, “who is the field controller from MI5. Is he about?”

“I believe he’s still up at the observation post,” said Low, “the house he has taken over opposite the target dwelling. I can call him and ask him to leave by the back and come here to join us.”

“I wonder, sir,” said Captain Lyndhurst to his CO, “whether I might not go up there right away. Give me a chance to have a first look at the ‘stronghold,’ and then I could come back with this Preston chap.”

“All right, since a car has to go up, anyway,” said the CO.

Fifteen minutes later, the police stationed on the hillside across the estuary from Eagle Wharf pointed out the rear door of No. 9 to Lyndhurst. Still in civilian clothes, the twenty-nine-year-old captain walked across the rough ground, hopped over the garden fence, and went in through the back door. He met Barney in the kitchen, where the watcher was brewing a cup of tea on Mrs. Adrian’s stove.

“Lyndhurst,” said the officer, “from the Regiment. Is Mr. Preston here?”

“John,” Barney called up the stairs in a hoarse whisper, as the house was supposed to be empty, “brown job here to see you.”

Lyndhurst mounted to the upstairs bedroom, where he found John Preston and introduced himself. Harry Burkinshaw muttered something about a cup of tea and left.

The captain stared across the road at No. 12.

“There still seem to be some gaps in our information,” drawled Lyndhurst. “Who exactly do you think is in there?”

“I believe it’s a Soviet agent,” said Preston, “an illegal, living here under the cover of James Duncan Ross. Mid-thirties, medium height and build, probably very fit, a top pro.”

He handed Lyndhurst the photograph taken on the Damascus street. The captain studied it with interest.

“Anyone else in there?”

“Possibly. We don’t know. Ross himself, certainly. He might have a helper. We can’t talk to the neighbors. In this kind of area we could never stop them gawping. Before they left, the people who live here said they were sure he was living alone. But we can’t prove that.”

“And according to our briefing, you think he’s armed, maybe dangerous. But too much for the local lads, even with handguns, mmmm?”

“Yes, we believe he has a bomb in there with him. He would have to be stopped before he could get to it.”

“Bomb, eh?” said Lyndhurst with apparent lack of interest. (He had done two tours in Northern Ireland.) “Big enough to make a mess of the house, or the entire street?”

“A bit bigger than that,” said Preston. “If we’re right, it’s a small nuke.”

The tall officer turned his entire gaze from the house across the street, and his pale blue eyes held Preston’s. “Bloody hell,” he said. “I’m impressed.”

“Well, that’s a plus,” said Preston. “By the way, I want him, and I want him alive.”

“Let’s go back to the docks and talk to the CO,” said Lyndhurst.

While Preston and Lyndhurst were getting acquainted at Cherryhayes Close, two more helicopters, a Puma and a Chinook, had arrived at the airport from Hereford. The first bore the assault team, the second their numerous and arcane pieces of equipment.

The team was under the temporary leadership of the deputy team commander, a veteran 240

staff sergeant named Steve Bilbow. He was short, dark, and wiry, tough as old boot leather, with bright, black-button eyes and a ready grin. Like all the senior NCOs in the Regiment, he had been with them a long time—in his case, fifteen years.

The SAS is unusual in this sense also: the officers are almost all on temporary assignment from their “parent” regiments and usually stay two to three years before returning to their own units. Only the Other Ranks stay with the SAS—and not all of them, just the best. Even the commanding officer, though he will probably have served with the Regiment before in his career, serves a short term as CO. Very few officers are long-stay men, and they are all in logistics/supply/technical posts in SAS Group Headquarters.

Steve Bilbow had entered as a trooper from the Parachute Regiment, done his tour, been selected on merit for extension of assignment, and had risen to staff sergeant. He had done two fighting tours in Dhofar, sweated through the jungles of Belize, frozen through the countless nights in ambush in south Armagh, and relaxed in the Cameron Highlands of Malaya. He had helped train the West German GSG-9 teams and worked with Charlie Beckwith’s Delta group in America.

In his time he had known the boredom of the endlessly repeated training that brought the men of the SAS to the ultimate peak of fitness and preparation, and the excitement of the high-adrenaline operations: racing under rebel fire for the shelter of a sangar in the hills of Oman, running a covert snatch-squad against Republican gunmen in east Belfast, and doing five hundred parachute jumps, most of them HALO jobs—high altitude, low opening. To his chagrin he had been one of the standby team when colleagues stormed the Iranian Embassy in London in 1981, and he had not been called on.

The rest of the team comprised one photographer, three intelligence collators, eight snipers, and nine assaulters. Steve hoped and prayed he would lead the assault team.

Several unmarked police vans had met them at the airport and brought them to the holding area. When Preston and Lyndhurst arrived back at the warehouse, the team had assembled and were spreading their gear on the floor before the bemused gaze of several Ipswich policemen.

“Hello, Steve,” said Captain Lyndhurst, “everything okay?”

“Hello, boss. Yes, fine. Just getting sorted.”

“I’ve seen the stronghold. It’s a small private house. One occupant known, maybe two.

And a bomb. It’ll be a small assault, no room for more. I’d like you to be first in.”

“Try and stop me, boss,” Bilbow answered, grinning.

The accent in the SAS is on self-discipline rather than the externally applied kind. Any man who cannot produce the self-discipline needed to go through what the SAS men must will not be there for long, anyway. Those who can do not need rigid formality in personal relationships, such as are proper in a line regiment.

Thus, officers habitually address those they command, apart from each other, by first names. Other Ranks tend to address their commissioned officers as “boss,” although the CO gets a “sir.” Among themselves, SAS troopers refer to an officer as “a Rupert.”

Staff Sergeant Bilbow caught sight of Preston, and his face lit up in a delighted grin.

“Major Preston ... Good heavens, it’s been a long time.”

Preston stuck out a hand and smiled back. The last time he had seen Steve Bilbow was when, in the aftermath of the shoot-out in the Bogside, he had taken refuge in a safe house where four SAS men under Bilbow’s command had been running a covert snatch-241 squad. Apart from that, they were both ex-Paras, which always forms a bond.

“I’m with Five now,” said Preston, “field controller for this operation, at least from Five’s end.”

“What have you got for us?” asked Steve.

“Russian. KBG agent. Top pro. Probably done the spetsnaz course, so he’ll be good, fast, and probably armed.”

“Lovely. Spetsnaz, eh? We’ll see how good they really are.”

All three present knew of the spetsnaz troops, the crack Russian elite saboteurs who comprised the Soviet equivalent of the SAS.

“Sorry to break up the party, but let’s get the briefing under way,” said Lyndhurst.

He and Preston mounted the stairs to the upper office, where they met Brigadier Cripps, the major in charge of operations, Chief Superintendent Low, and the SAS intelligence collators. Preston spent an hour giving as thorough a briefing as he could, and the atmosphere grew extremely grave.

“Have you any proof there’s a nuclear device in there?” asked Low at length.

“No, sir. We intercepted a component in Glasgow destined for delivery to someone working under cover in this country. The backroom boys say it could have no other use in this world. We know the man in that house is a Soviet illegal—he was made on the streets of Damascus by the Mossad. His associations with the secret transmitter in Chesterfield confirms what he is. So I am left with deductions.

“If the component taken in Glasgow was not for the construction of a small nuclear device inside Britain, then what the hell was it for? On that, I come up with no other feasible explanation. As to Ross, unless there are two major covert operations being mounted in Britain by the KGB, that component was destined for him. Q.E.D.”

“Yes,” said Brigadier Cripps, “I think we have to go with it. We have to assume it’s there. If it’s not, we’ll have to talk to friend Ross rather earnestly.”

Chief Superintendent Low was having a private nightmare. He had to accept the fact that there was no other way but storming the house. What he was trying to envisage was the condition of Ipswich if the device went off. “Couldn’t we evacuate?” he asked, with little hope.

“He’d notice,” said Preston flatly. “I think if he knows he’s ruined, he’ll take us all with him.”

The soldiers nodded. They knew that, deep inside Soviet Russia, they would have done the same.

The lunch hour was gone and no one had noticed. Food would have been superfluous.

The afternoon was spent in reconnaissance and preparation.

Steve Bilbow went back to the airport with the photographer and a policeman. The three took the Scout in one single run down the estuary of the Orwell, well away from The Hayes but on a course from which they could keep it in view. The policeman pointed out the house; the photographer ran off fifty stills while Steve took a long pan-shot on video for screening in the holding area.

The entire assault team, still in civilian clothes, went with the police to see the empty house that had been built by the same architects to the same plans as the one on Cherryhayes Close. By the time they got back to the holding area, they could see the stronghold on video and in close-up still pictures.

They spent the rest of the afternoon inside the holding area, practicing with the mock-up that the policemen had helped build, under SAS supervision, on the warehouse floor.

It was a hurried construction, with canvas “walls” dividing the “rooms,” but its dimensions were perfect, and it showed up one overriding factor: space inside the house was very limited. It had a narrow front door, a narrow hall, a cramped stairway, and small rooms.

To the eternal grief of the four who were left out, Captain Lyndhurst decided to use only six assaulters. There would also be three snipers—two in the Adrians’ upstairs front bedroom and one on the hill overlooking the back garden.

The rear of 12 Cherryhayes Close would be covered by two of Lyndhurst’s six assaulters. They would be in full combat gear but their uniforms would be covered by civilian raincoats. They would be driven in an unmarked police car to Brackenhayes Close. Here they would disembark and, without asking permission of the householders, would walk through the front garden of the house that backed onto the stronghold, down the side path between house and garage, and into the back garden. Here they would strip off the raincoats, hop over the garden fence, and take up position in the back garden of the stronghold.

“There may be a trip wire in the garden,” warned Lyndhurst. “But probably close to the rear of the house itself. Stand well back. On the signal, I want one stun grenade straight through the window of the rear bedroom and another through the kitchen window. Then unclip the HKs and hold position. Do not fire into the house; Steve and the lads will be coming in the front.”

The rear-access men nodded. Captain Lyndhurst knew that he would not be in the assault. Formerly a lieutenant in the King’s Dragoon Guards, he was on his first tour with the SAS and held captain’s rank because the SAS have no officers under that grade. He would revert to lieutenant on return to his parent regiment in a year, though he hoped to come back to the SAS later as a squadron commander.

He also knew the tradition of the SAS, which is at variance with the convention for the rest of the Army: officers participate in combat in desert or jungle but never in an urban environment. Only NCOs and troopers carry out such assaults.

The main attack, Lyndhurst had agreed with his CO and the operations officer, would be via the front. A van would draw up quietly and four assaulters would step out. Two would take the front door, one carrying the Wingmaster, the other wielding a seven-pound sledgehammer and/or bolt cutters if necessary.

The instant the door came down, the assault front rank—Steve Bilbow and a corporal—would go in. The door squad would drop their Wingmaster and hammer, rip their HKs off their chests, and enter the hallway as backup for the first pair.

On entering the hallway, Steve would step straight past the stairs to the door to the sitting room on his left. The corporal would race up the stairs to take the front bedroom.

Of the backup men, one would follow the corporal up the stairs in case Chummy was in the bathroom, and the other would follow Steve into the sitting room.

The signal for the two men in the back garden to hurl their stun grenades into the two rear rooms, kitchen and back bedroom, would be the crash of the Wingmaster at the front.

By the time entry had been made, therefore, anyone in the kitchen or back bedroom should be reeling around, wondering what had hit him.

Preston, who had volunteered to return to the observation post, was allowed to listen to the details of the assault.

He already knew that the SAS was the only regiment in the British Army allowed to choose its weaponry from a worldwide menu. For close assault they had selected the German Heckler and Koch short-barreled nine-millimeter rapid-fire submachine gun—

light, easy to handle, and very reliable, with an up-and-over folding stock.

They habitually wore the HK—loaded and cocked—slantwise across the chest; it was held in place by two spring-clips. This left their arms free for opening doors, entering through windows, or throwing stun grenades. When the weapon was needed, a single jerk brought the HK off the chest and into operation in less than half a second.

Practice had shown that to get through doors, it was faster to blast off both hinges rather than take the lock. For this purpose they favored the Remington Wingmaster pump-action repeater shotgun, but with solid heads rather than buckshot in the cartridges.

Apart from these playthings, one of the door squad would need a hammer and bolt cutters in case the door, having lost its hinges, was held on the other side by several bolts and a chain. They also carried stun grenades, designed to blind temporarily by their flash and deafen by their crack, but not to kill. Lastly, each man would have a thirteen-shot nine-millimeter Browning automatic on his hip.

In the assault, Lyndhurst stressed, timing was of the essence. For the hour of the attack he had chosen 9:45 p.m., when dusk would be deep in the Close but it would not yet be darkest night.

Lyndhurst himself would be in the Adrians’ house across the way, watching the target house and in radio contact with the van bearing his assaulters. Thus he could monitor the approach of the team. If there were a pedestrian moving down the Close at 9:44, Lyndhurst could tell the van driver to hold until the passerby had cleared the door of the stronghold to be assaulted. The police car bringing the two rear-garden men to position would be on the same wavelength, and would drop those two men ninety seconds before the front door came down.

Lyndhurst planned one last refinement. As the assault van cruised up the Close, he would telephone Ross from the Adrians’ house across the road. He already knew that the phone in each of these houses was kept on a small table in the hallway. The ploy was to distance the Soviet agent from his bomb, wherever it was, and to give the assaulters the chance of a fast shot.

Firing, as usual, would come in two fast bursts of two shots each. Although the HK can empty its thirty-round magazine in a couple of seconds, the SAS are accurate enough even in the confused conditions of a terrorist-hostage situation to limit their firing to two-shot bursts, with one repeat. Anyone stopping those four rounds will speedily feel very unwell. Such economy also keeps the hostages alive.

Immediately after the operation the police would move into the Close in strength to calm down the inevitable crowd that would come pouring out of the adjacent houses. A police cordon would be thrown around the front of the target house, and the assaulters would leave through the rear, cross the gardens, and board their van, which by then would be waiting in Brackenhayes Close. As for the interior of the stronghold, the civil authority would take over there as well. A team of six from Aldermaston was due into Ipswich by teatime that evening.

At six, Preston left the holding area and returned to the observation post—the Adrians’

house—which he entered, unobserved, by the rear door.

“Lights have just come on,” said Harry Burkinshaw when Preston joined him in the upstairs bedroom. Preston could see that the sitting-room curtains of the house opposite were drawn, but there was a light behind them and a reflected glow showing through the panels of the front door.

“I think I saw movement behind the net curtains in the upstairs bedroom just after you left,” said Barney. “But he didn’t put the light on—well, he wouldn’t, of course. It was just after lunch. Anyway, he hasn’t come out.”

Preston radioed Ginger on his hillside, but the story was the same. No movement at the back, either.

“It’ll start getting dark in a couple of hours,” Ginger told him over the radio. “Vision will deteriorate after that.”

Valeri Petrofsky had slept fitfully and not well. Just before one o’clock he awoke fully, propped himself up, and stared across his bedroom, through the net curtains, at the house across the way. After ten minutes he hauled himself off the bed, went to the bathroom, and showered.

He made lunch at two o’clock and ate it at the kitchen table, occasionally glancing into the back garden, where a fine and invisible fishing line ran from side to side, around a small pulley attached by night to the garden fence, and in through his back door. It was tied around the bottom of a column of empty tin cans in the kitchen. He slackened the tension when he was out of the house and tightened it when he was at home. No one had yet brought the tins clattering down.

The afternoon wore on. Not unnaturally, considering what reposed, armed and primed, in his sitting room, he was tense, all his senses at full alert. He tried to read but could not concentrate. Moscow must have had his message for twelve hours by now. He listened to some radio music, then at six settled down in the sitting room. Although he could see the sun reflected in the windows of the houses opposite, his own house faced east, so it was now in shadow. The twilight would deepen in his sitting room from now on. He closed the curtains, as ever, before putting on the reading lamps; then, for want of anything better to do, switched on the television news. As usual, it was dominated by the election campaign.

In the warehouse holding area, the tension was mounting. Final preparations were being made to the assaulters’ van, a plain gray Volkswagen with a sliding side door. Two men in plainclothes would be in the front, one driving and the other on the radio to Captain Lyndhurst. They checked those radios over and over again, as they tested every other piece of equipment.

The van would be led to the entrance to The Hayes by an unmarked police car; the driver of the van had memorized the geography of The Hayes and knew where to find Cherryhayes Close. As they entered The Hayes, they would come under the radio control of Captain Lyndhurst in his observation post. The rear of the van had been lined with polystyrene-foam sheeting to prevent the clink of metal on metal.

The assault team was dressing and “tooling up.” Over his underwear, each man pulled on the standard one-piece black jump suit of fire-resistant fabric. At the last moment this would be complemented by a treated black fabric balaclava hood. After that came the body armor, lightweight knitted Kevlar designed to absorb a bullet’s impact by spreading it outward and sideways from the point of penetration. Behind the Kevlar the men stuffed ceramic “trauma pads” to complete the job of blunting an onrushing projectile even further.

Over all this went the harness to hold the assault weapon, the HK, and to hold the grenades and handgun. On their feet they wore the traditional ankle-high desert boots with thick rubber soles, whose color can only be described as “dirty.”

Captain Lyndhurst had a last word with each man, and the longest with his assault leader, Steve Bilbow. There was, of course, no mention of good luck—anything else, but never “Good luck.” Then the commander left for the observation post.

He entered the Adrians’ house just after 8:00 p.m. Preston could feel the tension emanating from the man. At 8:30 the phone rang. Barney was in the hall, so he took it.

There had been several calls that day. Preston had decided it would be fruitless not to answer—someone might come to the house. Each time, the caller had been told that the Adrians were at her mother’s for the day and that the speaker was one of the team of painters redoing the sitting room. No caller had refused to accept this explanation. When Barney lifted the receiver, Captain Lyndhurst was coming out of the kitchen with a cup of tea.

“It’s for you,” Barney told the captain, and went back upstairs.

From 9:00 onward the tension rose steadily. Lyndhurst spent much time on the radio to the holding area, from which at 9:15 the gray van and its shepherding police car left for The Hayes. At 9:33 the two vehicles had reached the access on Belstead Road, two hundred yards from the target. They had to pause and wait. At 9:41 Mr. Armitage came out to leave four bottles for the milkman. Infuriatingly, he paused in the gathering gloom to inspect the stone bowl of flowers in the center of his front lawn. Then he greeted a neighbor across the road.

“Go back in, you old fool,” whispered Lyndhurst, standing in the sitting room and gazing across the road at the lights behind the curtains of the stronghold. At 9:42 the unmarked police car with the two rear-garden men was in position in Brackenhayes and waiting. Ten seconds later Armitage called good night to his neighbor and went back inside.

At 9:43 the gray van entered Gorsehayes, the development’s access road. Standing in the hall by the telephone, Preston could hear the chitchat between the van driver and Lyndhurst. The van was cruising slowly and quietly toward the entrance to Cherryhayes.

There were no pedestrians on the street. Lyndhurst ordered the two rear-garden men to leave their police car and start moving.

“Entering Cherryhayes fifteen seconds,” muttered the van’s co-driver.

“Slow down, thirty seconds to go,” replied Lyndhurst. Twenty seconds later he said,

“Enter the Close now.”

Around the corner came the van, quite slowly, with dimmers on. “Eight seconds,”

murmured Lyndhurst into the receiver, then a savage whisper to Preston: “Dial now.”

The van cruised up the Close, passed the door of No. 12, and stopped in front of Armitage’s bowl of flowers. Its position was deliberate—the assaulters wanted to approach the stronghold slantwise. The oiled side door of the van slid back, and into the gloom, in complete silence, stepped four men in black. There was no running, no pounding of feet, no hoarse cries. In rehearsed order they walked calmly across Armitage’s lawn, around Ross’s parked hatchback, and up to the front door of 12

Cherryhayes Close. The man with the Wingmaster knew which side the hinges would be on. Before he had finished walking, his gun was at his shoulder. He made out the hinge positions and took careful aim. Beside him another figure waited, with a sledgehammer swung back. Behind them were Steve and the corporal, HKs at the ready. ...

In his sitting room, Major Valeri Petrofsky was unquiet. He could not concentrate on the television; his senses picked up too much—the clatter of a man putting out milk bottles, the meow of a cat, the snarl of a motorcycle engine far away, the hoot of a freighter entering the estuary of the Orwell across the valley.

Nine-thirty had produced another current affairs program with yet more interviews with ministers and hopeful ministers-to-be. In exasperation he flicked over to BBC 2, only to find a documentary about birds. He sighed. It was better than politics.

It had been on scarcely ten minutes when he heard Armitage next door putting out his empty milk bottles. Always the same number and always the same time of night, he thought. Then the old fool was calling to someone across the street. Something on the television caught his eye and he stared in amazement. The interviewer was talking to a lanky man in a flat cap about his passion, which appeared to be pigeons. He was holding one up in front of the camera, a sleek creature with a distinctive cast to its beak and head.

Petrofsky sat bolt-upright, concentrating on the bird with almost all of his attention, listening to the interview with the rest. He was sure the bird was identical to one he had seen somewhere before.

“Is this lovely bird for showing in competition?” the interviewer was asking. She was new, a bit too bright, trying to squeeze more from the interview than it merited.

“Good Lord, no,” said the flat-cap man. “This isn’t a fancy. It’s a Westcott.”

In a bright flash of recall, Petrofsky saw again the room in the guest suite at the General Secretary’s dacha at Usovo. “Found him in the street last winter,” the wizened Englishman had said, and the bird had gazed out of its cage with bright, clever eyes.

“Well, it’s not the sort we would see about the town,” suggested the television interviewer. She was floundering. At that moment the telephone in Petrofsky’s hallway rang. ...

Normally he would have gone to answer it, in case it was a neighbor. To have pretended to be out would have roused suspicions, with the house lights on. And he would not have taken his handgun to the hall. But he stayed and stared at the screen. The phone rang on, insistently. With the television talk, it drowned the soft pad of rubber-soled feet on the pavement.

“I should hope not,” replied the flat-cap man cheerfully. “A Westcott ain’t a ‘streetie,’

neither. It’s probably one of the finest strains of racer there is. This little beauty will always speed back to the loft where it was raised. That’s why they’re more commonly known as homers.”

Petrofsky came out of his chair with a snarl of rage. The big precision-made Sako target pistol that he had kept close by him since he had entered Britain came up with him from its place down the side of the seat cushion. He uttered one short word in Russian.

No one heard him, but the word was traitor.

At that moment there was a roar, then another, so close together that they were almost one. With them came the shattering of glass from his front door, two huge bangs from the rear of the house, and the thud of feet in the hall. Petrofsky spun toward the sitting-room door and fired three times. His Sako Triace, made to take three interchangeable barrels, had the heaviest caliber of the three fitted. It also packed five rounds in its magazine. He used only three—he might need the other two for himself. But the three he fired slammed through the flimsy woodwork of the closed door into the hall beyond. ...

The citizens of Cherryhayes Close will describe that night for the rest of their lives, but none will ever get it quite right.

The roar of the Wingmaster, as it tore the hinges off the door, catapulted them all out of their chairs. The moment he had fired, the gunman stepped sideways and back to give room to his mate. One swing of the sledgehammer and the lock, bolt, and chain on the other side flew in all directions. Then he, too, stepped sideways and back. Both men dropped their weapons and flicked their HKs forward and out.

Steve and the corporal had already gone through the gap. The corporal took three bounds to get up the stairs, with the sledgehammer man following on his heels. Steve ran past the ringing telephone, reached the sitting-room door, turned to face it, and was lifted off his feet. The three slugs that ripped across the hallway hit him with an audible whap and blew him against the stairs. The Wingmaster man simply leaned across the still-closed door and fired two two-round bursts. Then he kicked the door open and went in on the roll, coming to his feet at the crouch, well inside the room.

When the shotgun fired, Captain Lyndhurst opened the front door across the street and watched; Preston was behind him. Through the lighted hallway the captain saw his deputy team commander approach the sitting-room door, only to be thrown aside like a rag doll. Lyndhurst started to walk forward; Preston followed.

As the trooper who had fired the two bursts came to his feet and surveyed the inert figure on the carpet, Captain Lyndhurst appeared in the doorway. He took in the scene at a glance, despite the drifting plume of cordite smoke. “Go and help Steve in the hall,” he said crisply. The trooper did not argue. The man on the floor began to move. Lyndhurst drew his Browning from beneath his jacket.

The trooper had been good. Petrofsky had taken one slug in the left knee, one in the lower stomach, and one in the right shoulder. His pistol had been flung across the room.

Despite the distortion caused by the door’s woodwork, the trooper had connected with three out of four slugs. Petrofsky was in hideous pain, but he was alive. He began to crawl. Twelve feet away he could see the gray steel, the flat box on its side, the two buttons, one yellow and one red. Captain Lyndhurst took careful aim and fired once.

John Preston ran past him so fast he jostled the officer’s hip. He went down on his knees beside the body on the floor. The Russian was lying on his side, half the back of his head blown away, his mouth still working as if he were a fish on a slab. Preston bent his head to the dying face. Lyndhurst still had his gun at the aim, but the MI5 man was between him and the Russian. He stepped to one side to get a clearer shot, then lowered the Browning. Preston was rising. There was no need for a second shot.

“We’d better get the wallahs from Aldermaston to have a look at that,” said Lyndhurst, gesturing at the steel cabinet in the corner.

“I wanted him alive,” said Preston.

“Sorry, old boy. Couldn’t be done,” said the captain.

At that moment both men jumped at the sound of a loud click and a voice speaking to them from the sideboard. They saw that the sound had come from a large radio set, which had switched itself on with a timer device. The voice said:

“Good evening. This is Radio Moscow, the English-language service, and here is the ten o’clock news. In Terry ... I’m sorry, I’ll say that again. In Teheran today, the government stated—”

Captain Lyndhurst stepped over and switched the machine off The man on the floor stared at the carpet with sightless eyes, immune to the coded message meant for him alone.

Chapter 23

The lunch invitation was for one o’clock on Friday, June 19, at Brooks’s Club in St.

James’s. Preston entered the portals at that hour, but even before he could announce himself to the club porter in the booth to his right, Sir Nigel was striding down the marbled hall to meet him. “My dear John, how kind of you to come.”

They adjourned to the bar for a pre-lunch drink, and the conversation was informal.

Preston was able to tell the Chief that he had just returned from Hereford, where he had visited Steve Bilbow in the hospital. The staff sergeant had had a lucky escape. Only when the flattened slugs from the Russian’s gun were removed from his body armor did one of the doctors notice a sticky smear and have it analyzed. The cyanide compound had failed to enter the bloodstream; the SAS man had been saved by the trauma pads.

Otherwise he was heavily bruised, slightly dented, but in good shape.

“Excellent,” said Sir Nigel with genuine enthusiasm, “one does so hate to lose a good man.”

For the rest, most of the bar was discussing the election result and many of those present had been up half the night waiting for the final results in the close-fought contest to come in from the provinces.

At half past the hour they went in to lunch. Sir Nigel had a corner table where they could talk in privacy. On the way in they passed the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Martin Flannery, coming the other way. Although they all knew each other, Sir Martin saw at once that his colleague was “in conference.” The mandarins acknowledged each other’s presence with an imperceptible inclination of the head, sufficient for two scholars of Oxford. Backslapping is best left to foreigners.

“I really asked you here, John,” said C as he spread his linen napkin over his knees, “to offer you my thanks and my congratulations. A remarkable operation and an excellent result. I suggest the rack of lamb, quite delicious at this time of year.”

“As to the congratulations, sir, I fear I can hardly accept them,” said Preston quietly.

Sir Nigel studied the menu through his half-moon glasses. “Indeed? Are you being admirably modest or not so admirably discourteous? Ah, beans, carrots, and perhaps a roast potato, my dear.”

“Simply realistic, I hope,” said Preston when the waitress departed, “Might we discuss the man we knew as Franz Winkler?“

“Whom you so brilliantly tailed to Chesterfield.”

“Permit me to be frank, Sir Nigel. Winkler could not have shaken off a headache with a box of aspirins. He was an incompetent and a fool.”

“I believe he almost lost you all at Chesterfield railway station.”

“A fluke,” said Preston. “With a bigger watcher operation, we’d have had men at each stop along the line. The point is, his maneuvers were clumsy; they told us he was a pro, and a bad one at that, yet failed to shake us.”

“I see. What else about Winkler? Ah, the lamb, and cooked to perfection.”

They waited until they were served and the waitress was gone. Preston picked at his food, troubled. Sir Nigel ate with enjoyment.

“Franz Winkler came into Heathrow with a genuine Austrian passport containing a valid British visa.”

“So he did, to be sure,”

“And we both know, as did the immigration officer, that Austrian citizens do not need a visa to enter Britain. Any consular officer of ours in Vienna would have told Winkler that. It was the visa that prompted the passport control officer at Heathrow to run the passport number through the computer. And it turned out to be false.”

“We all make mistakes,” murmured Sir Nigel.

“The KGB does not make that kind of mistake, sir. Their documentation is accurate to the point of brilliance.”

“Don’t overestimate them, John. All large organizations occasionally make a balls-up.

More carrots? No? Then, if I may ...”

“The point is, sir, there were two flaws in that passport. The reason the number caused red lights to flick on was that three years ago another supposed Austrian bearing a passport with the same number was arrested in California by the FBI and is now serving time in Soledad.”

“Really? Good Lord, not very clever of the Soviets after all.”

“I called up the FBI man here in London and asked what the charge had been. It appears the other agent was trying to blackmail an executive of the Intel Corporation in Silicon Valley into selling him secrets of technology.”

“Very naughty.”

“Nuclear technology.”

“Which gave you the impression ...?”

“That Franz Winkler came into this country lit up like a neon sign. And the sign was a message—a message on two legs.”

Sir Nigel’s face was still wreathed in good humor, but some of the twinkle had faded from his eyes.

“And what did this remarkable message say, John?”

“I think it said: I cannot give you the executive illegal agent because I do not know where he is. But follow this man; he will lead you to the transmitter. And he did. So I staked out the transmitter and the agent came to it at last.”

Sir Nigel replaced his knife and fork on the empty plate and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. “What, exactly, are you trying to say?”

“I believe, sir, that the operation was blown. It seems to me unavoidable to conclude that someone on the other side deliberately blew it away.”

“What an extraordinary suggestion. Let me recommend the strawberry flan. Had some last week. Different batch, of course. Yes? Two, my dear, if you please. Yes, a little fresh cream.”

“May I ask a question?” said Preston when the plates had been cleared.

Sir Nigel smiled. “I’m sure you will, anyway.”

“Why did the Russian have to die?”

“As I understand it, he was crawling toward a nuclear bomb with every apparent intention of detonating it.”

“I was there,” said Preston as the strawberry flan arrived. They waited until the cream had been poured.

“The man was wounded in the knee, stomach, and shoulder. Captain Lyndhurst could have stopped him with a kick. There was no need to blow his head off.”

“I’m sure the good captain wished to make absolutely sure,” suggested the Master.

“With the Russian alive, Sir Nigel, we would have had the Soviet Union bang to rights, caught in the act. Without him, we have nothing that cannot be convincingly denied. In other words, the whole thing now has to be suppressed forever.”

“How true,” the spymaster replied, masticating thoughtfully on a mouthful of shortcake pastry and strawberries.

“Captain Lyndhurst happens to be the son of Lord Frinton.”

“Indeed. Frinton? Does one know him?”

“Apparently. You were at school together.”

“Really? There were so many. Hard to recall.”

“And I believe Julian Lyndhurst is your godson.”

“My dear John, you do check up on things, don’t you, now?”

Sir Nigel had finished his dessert. He steepled his hands, placed his chin on his knuckles, and regarded the MI5 investigator steadily. The courtesy remained; the good humor was draining away. “Anything else?”

Preston nodded gravely. “An hour before the assault on the house began, Captain Lyndhurst took a call in the hallway of the house across the road. I checked with my colleague who first took the phone. The caller was ringing from a public box.”

“No doubt one of his colleagues.”

“No, sir. They were using radios. And no one outside that operation knew we were inside the house. No one, that is, but a very few in London.”

“May I ask what you are suggesting?”

“Just one more detail, Sir Nigel. Before he died, that Russian whispered one word. He seemed very determined to get that single word out before he went. I had my ear close to his mouth at the time. What he said was: ‘Philby.’ ”

“ ‘Philby’? Good heavens. I wonder what he could have meant by that.”

“I think I know. I think he thought Harold Philby had betrayed him, and I believe he was right.”

“I see. And may I be privileged to know of your deductions?”

The Chiefs voice was soft, but his tone was devoid of all his earlier bonhomie.

Preston took a deep breath. “I deduce that Philby the traitor was a party to this operation, possibly from the outset. If he was, he would have been in a no-lose situation.

Like others, I have heard it whispered that he wants to return home, here to England, to spend his last days.

“If the plan had worked, he could probably have earned his release from his Soviet masters and his entry from a new Hard Left government in London. Perhaps a year from now. Or he could tell London the general outline of the plan, then betray it.”

“And which of these two remarkable choices do you suspect he made?”

“The second one, Sir Nigel.”

“To what end, pray?”

“To buy his ticket home. From this end. A trade.”

“And you think I would be a party to that trade?”

“I don’t know what to think, Sir Nigel. I don’t know what else to think. There has been talk ... about his old colleagues, the magic circle, the solidarity of the establishment of which he was once a member ... that sort of thing.”

Preston studied his plate, with its half-eaten strawberries. Sir Nigel gazed at the ceiling for a long time before letting out a profound sigh. “You’re a remarkable man, John. Tell me, what are you doing a week from today?”

“Nothing, I believe.”

“Then please meet me at the door of Sentinel House at eight in the morning of June twenty-sixth. Bring your passport. And now, if you’ll forgive me, I suggest we forgo coffee in the library. ...”

The man at the upper window of the safe house in the Geneva back street stood and watched the departure of his visitor. The head and shoulders of the guest appeared below him; the man walked down the short path to the front gate and stepped into the street, where his car waited. The car’s driver stepped out, came around the vehicle, and opened the door for the senior man. Then he walked back to the driver’s door.

Before he climbed back into the car, Preston raised his gaze to the figure behind the glass in the upper window. When he was behind the steering wheel he asked, “That’s him? That’s really him? The man from Moscow?”

“Yes, that’s him. And now, the airport, if you please,” replied Sir Nigel from the rear seat. They drove away.

“Well, John, I promised you an explanation,” said Sir Nigel a few moments later. “Ask your questions.”

Preston could see the face of the Chief in his rearview mirror. The older man was gazing out at the passing countryside.

“The operation?”

“You were quite right. It was mounted personally by the General Secretary, with the advice and assistance of Philby. It seems it was called Plan Aurora. It was betrayed, but not by Philby.”

“Why was it blown away?”

Sir Nigel thought for several minutes. “From quite an early stage I believed that you could be right. Both in your tentative conclusions of last December in what is now called the Preston report and in your deductions after the intercept in Glasgow. Even though Harcourt-Smith declined to believe in either. I was not certain the two were linked, but I was not prepared to discount it. The more I looked at it, the more I became convinced that Plan Aurora was not a true KGB operation. It had not the hallmarks, the painstaking care. It looked like a hasty operation mounted by a man or a group who distrusted the KGB. Yet there was little hope of your finding the agent in time.”

“I was floundering in the dark, Sir Nigel. And I knew it. There were no patterns of Soviet couriers showing up on any of our immigration controls. Without Winkler I’d never have got to Ipswich in time.”

They drove for several minutes in silence. Preston waited for the Master to resume in his own time.

“So, I sent a message to Moscow,” said Sir Nigel eventually.

“From yourself?”

“Good Lord, no. That would never have done. Much too obvious. Through another source, one I hoped would be believed. It was not a very truthful message, I’m afraid.

Sometimes one must tell untruths in our business. But it went through a channel I hoped would be believed.”

“And it was?”

“Thankfully, yes. When Winkler arrived I was sure the message had been received, understood, and, above all, believed as true.”

“Winkler was the reply?” asked Preston.

“Yes. Poor man. He believed he was on a routine mission to check on the Stephanides brothers and their transmitter. By the by, he was found drowned in Prague two weeks ago. Knew too much, I suppose.”

“And the Russian in Ipswich?”

“His name, I have just learned, was Petrofsky. A first-class professional, and a patriot.”

“But he, too, had to die?”

“John, it was a terrible decision. But unavoidable. The arrival of Winkler was an offer, a proposal for a trade-off. No formal agreement, of course. Just a tacit understanding. The man Petrofsky could not be taken alive and interrogated. I had to go along with the unwritten and unspoken trade with the man in the window back there at the safe house.”

“If we had got Petrofsky alive, we’d have had the Soviet Union over a barrel.”

“Yes, John, indeed we would. We could have subjected them to a huge international humiliation. And to what end? The USSR could not have taken it lying down. They’d have had to reply somewhere else in the world. What would you have wished? A return to the worst aspects of the Cold War?”

“It seems a pity to lose an opportunity to screw them, sir.”

“John, they’re big and armed and dangerous. The USSR is going to be there tomorrow and next week and next year. Somehow we have to share this planet with them. Better they be ruled by pragmatic and realistic men than hotheads and zealots.”

“And that merits a trade with men like the one in the window, Sir Nigel?”

“Sometimes it has to be done. I’m a professional, so is he. There are journalists and writers who would have it that we in our profession live in a dream world. In reality it’s the reverse. It is the politicians who dream their dreams—sometimes dangerous dreams, like the General Secretary’s dream of changing the face of Europe as his personal monument.

“A top intelligence officer has to be harder-headed than the toughest businessman. One has to trim to the reality, John. When the dreams take command, one ends up with the Bay of Pigs. The first break in the Cuban missiles impasse was suggested by the KGB

rezident in New York. It was Khrushchev, not the professionals, who had gone over the top.”

“So what happens next, sir?”

The old spymaster sighed. “We leave it to them. There will be some changes made.

They will make them in their own inimitable way. The man back there in the house will set them in train. His career will be advanced, those of others broken.”

“And Philby?” asked Preston.

“What about Philby?”

“Is he trying to come home?”

Sir Nigel shrugged impatiently. “For years past,” he said. “And, yes, he’s in touch from time to time, covertly, with my people in our embassy over there. We breed pigeons. ...”

“Pigeons?”

“Very old-fashioned, I know. And simple. But still surprisingly efficient. That’s how he communicates. But not about Plan Aurora. And even if he had, so far as I am concerned—”

“So far as you are concerned—?”

“He can rot in hell,” said Sir Nigel softly.

They drove for a while in silence.

“What about you, John? Will you stay with Five now?”

“I don’t think so, sir. I’ve had a good run. The DG retires on September first, but he’ll take final leave next month. I don’t fancy my chances under his successor.”

“Can’t take you into Six. You know that. We don’t take late entrants. Thought of returning to Civvy Street?”

“Not the best time for a man of forty-six with no known skills to get a job nowadays,” said Preston.

“I have some friends,” mused the Master. “They’re in asset protection. They might be able to use a good man. I could have a word.”

“Asset protection?”

“Oil wells, mines, deposits, racehorses ... Things people want kept safe from theft or destruction. Even themselves. It would pay well. Enable you to take full care of that son of yours.”

“It seems I’m not the only one who checks up on things,” Preston said, grinning.

The older man was staring out of the window, as if at something far away and long ago. “Had a son myself once,” he said quietly. “Just the one. Fine lad. Killed in the Falklands. Know how you feel.”

Surprised, Preston glanced at the man in the mirror. It had never occurred to him that this urbane and wily spymaster had once played horse-and-rider with a small boy on a sitting-room carpet.

“I’m sorry. Perhaps I’ll take you up on that.”

They arrived at the airport, turned in the rented car, and flew back to London, as anonymous as they had come.

The man in the window of the safe house watched the Britisher’s car move away. His own driver would not be there for an hour. He turned back to the room and sat down at the desk to study again the folder he had been brought and which he still held in his hands. He was pleased; it had been a good meeting, and the documents he held would secure his future.

As a professional, Lieutenant General Yevgeni Karpov was sorry about Plan Aurora. It had been good—subtle, low-profile, and effective. But as a professional he also knew that once an operation was well and truly burned there was nothing for it but to cancel and repudiate the whole thing before it was too late. To delay would have been utterly disastrous.

He recalled clearly the batch of documents that his bagman had brought from Jan Marais in London, the product of his agent Hampstead. Six had been the usual stuff, top-rate intelligence material such as only a man of the eminence of George Berenson could have acquired. The seventh had caused him to sit transfixed.

It was a personal memorandum from Berenson to Marais, for transmission to Pretoria.

In it the Defense Ministry official had told how, as Deputy Chief of Defense Procurement, with special responsibility for nuclear devices, he had been present at a very restricted briefing by the Director-General of MI5, Sir Bernard Hemmings.

The counterintelligence chief had told the small group that his agency had uncovered the existence and most of the details of a Soviet conspiracy to import in kit form, assemble, and detonate a small atomic device inside Britain. The sting was in the tail: MI5 was closing fast upon the Russian illegal in command of the operation in Britain, and was confident of catching him with all the necessary evidence on him.

Entirely because of its source, General Karpov had believed the report completely.

There was an immediate temptation to let the British go ahead; but second thoughts showed this to be disastrous. If the British succeeded alone and unaided, there would be no obligation to suppress the horrendous scandal. To create that obligation, he needed to send a message, and to a man who would understand what had to be done, someone he could deal with across the great divide.

Then there was the question of his personal self-advancement. ... It was after a long, lonely walk in the spring-green forests of Peredelkino that he had decided to take the most dangerous gamble of his life. He had decided to pay a discreet visit to the private office of Nubar Gevorkovitch Vartanyan.

He had chosen his man with care. The Politburo member from Armenia was believed to be the man who headed the covert faction inside the Politburo that privately thought it was time for a change at the top.

Vartanyan had listened to him without saying a word, secure that he was far too highly placed for his office to be bugged. He just stared at the KGB general with his black lizard’s eyes as he listened. When Karpov had finished, he had asked, “You are certain your information is correct, Comrade General?”

“I have the full narrative from Professor Krilov on tape,” said Karpov. “The machine was in my briefcase at the time.”

“And the information from London?”

“Its source is impeccable. I have run the man personally for nearly three years.”

The Armenian power broker stared at him for a long time, as if reflecting on many things, not least how this information could be used to advantage.

“If what you say is true, there has been recklessness and adventurism at the highest level in our country. If such could be proved—of course, one would need the proof—there might have to be changes at the top. Good day to you.”

Karpov had understood. When the man on the pinnacle in Soviet Russia fell, all his own men fell with him. If there were changes at the top, there would be a vacant slot as Chairman of the KGB, a slot that Karpov felt would suit him admirably. But to cobble together his alliance of Party forces, Vartanyan would need proof, more proof, solid, irrefutable, documentary proof, that the act of recklessness had almost brought disaster.

No one had ever forgotten that Mikhail Suslov had toppled Khrushchev in 1964 on charges of adventurism over the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Shortly after the meeting, Karpov had sent in Winkler, the most bumbling agent his files could unearth. His message had been read and understood. Now he held in his hands the proof his Armenian patron needed. He looked through the documents again.

The report of the mythical interrogation and the confession of Major Valeri Petrofsky to the British would need some amendment, but he had people out at Yasyenevo who could accomplish that. The interrogation report forms were absolutely authentic—that was the main thing. Even Preston’s reports on his progress, suitably amended to exclude any mention of Winkler, were photocopies of the originals.

The General Secretary would not be able or willing to save the traitor Philby; nor, later, would he be able to save himself. Vartanyan would see to that, and he would not be ungrateful.

Karpov’s car came to take him to Zurich and the Moscow plane. He rose. It had been a good meeting. And as always it had been rewarding to negotiate with Chelsea.