The Fourth Protocol

“There’s a bidding conference going on up at Charles. I’ll try to get an extra team,” said Preston.

The ice-cream van made twelve calls that morning, all in the St. John’s Wood/Swiss Cottage area, with two as far south as Marylebone.

Some of the deliveries were in apartment buildings, where it was hard for the watchers to appear inconspicuous, but they noted every address. Then the van drove back to the shop. It made no afternoon deliveries.

“Will you drop that list at Cork on your way home?” Preston asked Stewart.

That evening, the phone-tap people reported that Berenson had had four telephone calls while he was at home, including one in which the caller turned out to have a wrong number. He had made no outgoing calls. Everything was on tape. Did Preston want to play it? There was nothing remotely suspicious on it. He thought he might as well.

On Saturday morning, Preston played the longest shot of his life. Using a tape recorder set up by the Technical Support people, and a variety of excuses to the householders, he called up each one of the recipients of the ice cream, asking whenever a woman answered if he might speak to her husband. Since it was Saturday, he got all but one.

One voice seemed slightly familiar. What was it—a hint of accent? And where could he have heard it before? He checked the name of the householder. It meant nothing.

He ate a moody lunch in a café near Cork Street. The connection came to him over the coffee. He hurried back to Cork Street and played the tapes again. Possible—not conclusive, but possible.

Scotland Yard, among the copious facilities of its Forensic Science Department, has a section devoted to voice analysis, which is useful whenever a target criminal, having had his phone tapped, denies it was his voice on the tape. MI5, having no forensic facilities, has to rely on Scotland Yard for this sort of thing, an arrangement usually secured via the Special Branch.

Preston called Detective Sergeant Lander at home, and it was Lander who fixed a priority meeting in Scotland Yard’s voice-analysis section that same afternoon. There was only one technician available, and he was loath to leave his televised football game to come to work, but he did. A thin young man with thick-lensed glasses, he played Preston’s tapes half a dozen times, watching the illuminated line on the oscilloscope screen rise and fall to record the tiniest shades of tone and timbre in the voices.

“Same voice,” he said at last, “no question about it.”

On Sunday, Preston identified the owner of the accented voice by using the Diplomatic List. He also called a friend in the Physics Department of London University, spoiled his day off by asking for a considerable favor, and finally telephoned Sir Bernard Hemmings at his Surrey home.

“I think there is something that we should report to the Paragon Committee, sir,” he said, “tomorrow morning.”

The Paragon Committee met at 11:00 a.m. on Monday, March 2, and Sir Anthony Plumb asked Preston to make his report. There was an air of expectancy, although Sir Bernard Hemmings looked grave.

Preston detailed the events of the first two days following the distribution of the Ascension Island paper as briefly as he could. There was a stir of interest at the news of Berenson’s odd and very brief call from a public phone box on the previous Wednesday evening.

“Did you tape-record that call?” asked Sir Peregrine Jones.

“No, sir, we couldn’t get near enough,” replied Preston.

“Then what do you think it was for?”

“I believe Mr. Berenson was alerting his controller to a pending ‘drop,’ probably using a code to indicate the time and place.”

“Have you any proof of that?” asked Sir Hubert Villiers of the Home Office.

“No, sir.”

Preston went on to describe the visit to the ice-cream parlor, the abandonment of the Daily Telegraph, and the fact that it was cleared away by the proprietor himself.

“Did you manage to recover the paper?” asked Sir Paddy Strickland.

“No, sir. To have raided the ice-cream shop then might have caused the arrest of Mr.

Benotti, and perhaps of Mr. Berenson, but Benotti could have pleaded complete innocence that there was anything inside the newspaper, and Berenson could have pleaded that he had made a terribly careless mistake.”

“But you believe that visit to the ice-cream shop was the drop?” asked Sir Anthony Plumb.

“I’m sure of it,” said Preston. He went on to describe the delivery of one-gallon tubs of ice cream to a dozen customers the next morning, how he had obtained voice samples of eleven of them, and Berenson’s receipt of a wrong-number call that same evening. “The voice that dialed him that evening and established that the caller had obtained a wrong number, apologized, and rang off was the voice of one of the recipients of the ice cream.”

There was silence around the table.

“Could it have been a coincidence?” asked Sir Hubert Villiers doubtfully. “There are an awful lot of perfectly innocent wrong numbers dialed in this city. Get ’em myself, all the time.”