The Fourth Protocol

Without a word the driver opened the glove compartment, produced a bottle, and handed it back to his two colleagues. One held Levy’s nose closed and the other poured the white grain spirit of a local brand down the gagging throat. When three quarters of it was gone, they stopped and left him alone. Raoul Levy began to drift away in an alcoholic daze. Even the pain eased a bit. The three men in the car, and the one in the sedan ahead of them, waited.

At 11:15 the interrogator came from the first car and muttered something through the window. Levy was unconscious by then but moving fitfully. The men beside him hauled him out of the car and half carried him toward the tracks. At 11:20 one of them hit him hard on the head with an iron bar, and he died. They laid him on the tracks with his shattered hands on one of the rails and his broken head near it.

Hans Grobbelaar has taken the last express of the night out of Lier at 11:09 exactly, as always. It was a routine run and he would be home in his warm bed in Herentals by 1:00 a.m. It was a nonstop freight and he went through Nijlen on time at 11:19. After the crossings there, he piled on the power and went down the straight toward the Looy Straat crossing at close to seventy miles an hour, the spotlight of the big 6268 lighting up the track for a hundred yards ahead.

Just short of the Looy Straat he saw the huddled figure lying on the track and slammed on his brakes. Sheets of sparks flew out from his wheels. The freight train began to slow, but nowhere near enough. Mouth open, be watched through the windshield as the headlight flew toward the crumpled figure. Two men in the yard had had it happen to them before; whether the victims had been suicides or drunks, no one ever knew. Not afterward. With this kind of rig you don’t even feel the thud, they had said. He didn’t.

The screaming locomotive flashed over the spot at thirty miles an hour.

When he finally stopped he could not even look. He ran to one of the farms and raised the alarm. When the police came with lanterns, the mess under his wheels looked like strawberry jam. Hans Grobbelaar did not reach home until dawn.

That same morning, John Preston entered the lobby of the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall, approached the desk, and used his universal pass to identify himself. After the inevitable check call to the man he had come to see, he was escorted into the elevator and down several corridors to the office of the ministry’s head of internal security, a room high at the back of the building and overlooking the Thames.

Brigadier Bertie Capstick had changed little since Preston had last seen him, years before, in Ulster. Big, florid, and genial, with apple cheeks that made him look more like a farmer than a soldier, he came forward with a roar of “Johnny, my boy, as I live and breathe. Come in, come in.”

Although only ten years older than Preston, Bertie Capstick had a habit of calling almost anyone his junior “my boy,” which gave him an avuncular air, matched by his appearance. But he had been a tough soldier once, moving deep into terrorist country during the Malay campaign and later commanding a group of infiltration experts in the jungles of Borneo during what was now called the Indonesian emergency.

Capstick sat Preston down and produced a bottle of single malt from a filing cabinet.

“Fancy a snort?”

“Bit early,” protested Preston. It was just past eleven o’clock.

“Nonsense. For old times’ sake. Anyway, the coffee they bring you here is abysmal.”

Capstick sat himself down and pushed the glass toward Preston across his desk. “So, what have they done with you, my boy?”

Preston grimaced. “I told you on the phone what they’ve given me,” he said. “Bloody policeman’s job. No disrespect to you, Bertie.”

“Well, same with me, Johnny. Out to grass. Of course I’m retired from the Army now, so I’m not too bad. Took my pension at fifty-five and managed to get this slot. Not too bad. Potter up on the train every day, check up on all the security routines, make sure no one’s being a bad lad, and go home to the little woman. Could be worse. Anyway, here’s to the old days.”

“Cheers,” said Preston. They drank.

The old days had not been quite so genial as that, thought Preston. When last he had seen Bertie Capstick, then a full colonel, almost six years before, the deceptively extroverted officer had been Deputy Director of Military Intelligence in Northern Ireland, working out of that complex of buildings at Lisburn whose data banks can tell the inquirer which IRA man has scratched his backside recently.

Preston had been one of Capstick’s “boys,” working in civilian clothes and undercover, moving through hard-line Provo ghettos to talk with informers or pick up packages from dead drops. It was Bertie Capstick who had loyally stuck by him in the face of the wittering civil servants from Holyrood House when Preston was “burned” and nearly killed while on a mission for Capstick.