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.