The Fourth Protocol

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.