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.