The Fourth Protocol

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.