The Fourth Protocol

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.