The Fourth Protocol

The turning of the key would have established the complete link, activating the whole system. But with the plunger blanked from the microswitch, the door system, at least, would be inert. Rawlings was certain he could take that door lock within thirty minutes.

In the apartment itself there would be other traps. He would cope with those when he met them.

Finishing his coffee, he reached for his file of newspaper cuttings. Like all jewel thieves, Rawlings followed the society gossip columns closely. This particular file was entirely about the social appearances of Lady Fiona and the suite of perfect diamonds she had worn to the gala ball the previous evening—so far as Jim Rawlings was concerned, for the last time.

A thousand miles to the east, the old man standing at the window of the sitting room in the third-floor-front apartment at Mira Prospekt 111 was also thinking of midnight. It would herald January 1, 1987, his seventy-fifth birthday.

The hour was well past midday but he was still in a robe; there was little enough cause these days to rise early or spruce up to go to the office. There was no office to go to. His Russian wife, Erita, thirty years his junior, had taken their two boys skating along the flooded and frozen lanes of Gorki Park, so he was alone.

He caught a glance of himself in a wall mirror, and the prospect brought him no more joy than he felt at contemplating his life, or what was left of it. His face, always lined, was now deeply furrowed. His hair, once thick and dark, was now snow-white, skimpy, and lifeless. His skin, after a lifetime of titanic drinking and chain-smoking, was blotched and mottled. His eyes gazed back miserably. He returned to the window and looked down at the snow-choked street. A few muffled, huddled babushkas were sweeping away the snow, which would fall again tonight.

It had been so long, he mused, twenty-four years almost to the day, since he had quit his non-job and pointless exile in Beirut to come here. There had been no point in staying. Nick Elliot and the rest at “the Firm” had got it all together by then; he had finally admitted it to them himself. So he had come, leaving wife and children to join him later if they wished.

At first he thought it was like coming home, to a spiritual and moral home. He had thrown himself into the new life; he had truly believed in the philosophy and its eventual triumph. Why not? He had spent twenty-seven years serving it. He had been happy and fulfilled those first, early years of the 1960s. There had been the extensive debriefing, of course, but he had been revered within the Committee of State Security. He was, after all, one of the “Five Stars”—the greatest of them all—along with Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, and Blake, the ones who had burrowed into the inner core of the British establishment and betrayed it all.

Burgess, drinking and buggering his way to an early grave, had been in it before he had arrived. Maclean had lost his illusions first, but then he had been in Moscow since 1951.

By 1963 he was sour and embittered, taking it out on Melinda, who had finally quit to come here, to this apartment. Maclean had gone on, somehow, utterly disillusioned and resentful, until the cancer got him, by which time he hated his hosts and they hated him.

Blunt had been “blown” and disgraced back in England. That left him and Blake, the old man thought. In a way he envied Blake, completely assimilated, utterly content, who had invited him and Erita for New Year’s Eve. Of course, Blake had had the cosmopolitan background, Dutch father, Jewish mother.

For him there could be no assimilation; he had known that after the first five years. By then he had learned fluent Russian, written and spoken, but he still retained a remarkable English accent. Apart from that, he had come to hate the society. It was a completely, irreversibly, and unalterably alien society.

That was not the worst of it; within seven years of arriving he had lost his last political illusions. It was all a lie, and he had been smart enough to see through it. He had spent his youth and manhood serving a lie, lying for the lie, betraying for the lie, abandoning that

“green and pleasant land”—and all for a lie.

For years, provided as of right with every British magazine and newspaper, he had followed the cricket scores while advising on the inspiration of strikes, looked at the old familiar places in the magazines while preparing disinformation aimed at bringing it all to ruin, perched unobserved on a barstool in the National to listen to the Brits laughing and joking in his language while counseling the top men of the KGB, including even the Chairman himself, on how best to subvert that little island. And all the time, deep inside, these past fifteen years, there had been a great void of despair that not even the drink and the many women had been able to blank out. It was too late; he could never go back, he told himself. And yet, and yet ...