The Fourth Protocol

“I checked with a friend yesterday who has access to a computer,” said Preston levelly.

“The chances of a man in a city of twelve million going into an ice-cream parlor for a sundae, of that ice-cream parlor’s delivering to twelve customers the next morning, and of one of those customers speaking through a wrong number to the ice-cream eater by midnight are more than a million to one. The telephone call on Friday evening was an acknowledgment of safe receipt.”

“Let me see if I understand,” said Sir Perry Jones. “Berenson recovered from his colleagues their photocopies of my fictitious paper and pretended to shred them all. In fact, he retained one. He folded it inside his newspaper and left it in the ice-cream shop.

The proprietor collected the paper, plastic-wrapped the classified document, and delivered it next morning to the controller in a tub of ice cream. The controller then alerted Berenson that he had got it.”

“That is what I believe happened,” said Preston.

“Chances of a million to one,” mused Sir Anthony Plumb. “Nigel, what do you think?”

The Chief of the SIS shook his head. “I don’t believe in chances of a million to one,”

he said. “Not in our work—eh, Bernard? No, it was a drop, all right, from the source to the controller via a cutout, Signor Benotti. John Preston has got it right. My congratulations. Berenson’s our man.”

“What has happened since you made this connection, Mr. Preston?” asked Sir Anthony.

“I have switched the surveillance from Berenson to the controller,” said Preston. “I’ve identified him. In fact, this morning I joined the watchers and followed him from his Marylebone flat, where he lives alone as a bachelor, to his office. He is a foreign diplomat. His name is Jan Marais.”

“Jan? Sounds Czech,” said Sir Perry Jones.

“Not quite,” said Preston somberly. “Jan Marais is an accredited diplomat on the staff of the embassy of the Republic of South Africa.”

There was a stunned, disbelieving silence. Sir Paddy Strickland, in language not habitually favored by diplomats, muttered, “Bloody hell.” All eyes turned on Sir Nigel Irvine.

He sat at the end of the table, badly shaken. If it’s true, he thought privately, I’ll have his balls for cocktail olives. He was thinking of General Henry Pienaar, head of South Africa’s National Intelligence Service, successor to the late, unlamented Bureau of State Security. For the South Africans to hire a few London crooks to burgle the archives of the African National Congress was one thing; to run a spy ring inside the British Defense Ministry was, between services, a declaration of war.

“I think, gentlemen, with your indulgence I am going to have to ask for a few days to investigate this matter a little further,” said Sir Nigel.

Two days later, on March 4, one of the senior Cabinet ministers in whom Mrs. Thatcher had confided her desire to go for an early general election was having breakfast with his wife in their handsome town house in Holland Park, London. The wife was browsing through a sheaf of holiday brochures.

“Corfu is nice,” she said, “or Crete.” There was no response, so she pressed her point.

“Darling, we should try to get away for a fortnight of complete rest this summer. It’s been nearly two years, after all. What about June? Before the crush but when the weather is at its best.”

“Not June,” said the minister, without looking up.

“But June’s beautiful,” she protested.

“Not June,” he repeated, “anything but June.”

Her eyes widened. “What’s so important about June?”

“Never mind.”

“You cunning old fox,” she said breathlessly. “It’s Margaret, isn’t it? That cozy little chat at Chequers last Sunday week. She’s going to the country. Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Shush,” said her husband, but after twenty-five years she knew when she had got it right. She looked up to see Emma, their daughter, standing in the doorway.

“Are you off, darling?”

“Yeah,” said the girl, “see you.”

Emma Lockwood was nineteen, a student at art college who subscribed with all her youthful enthusiasm to the cult called “radical politics.” She abominated her father’s political views and sought to protest against them by her own life-style. To her parents’ tolerant exasperation she was never missing from antinuclear demonstrations or the noisier manifestations of left-wing protest. One of her means of personal protest was to sleep with Simon Devine, a lecturer at a polytechnic college whom she had met at a demonstration.

He was no great lover, but he impressed her with his firebrand Trotskyism and pathological hatred of the “bourgeoisie,” which appeared to include anyone who did not agree with him. Those able to disagree more effectively than the bourgeois were termed fascists. To Devine that evening, in his bedsitter, she vouchsafed the tip she had overheard while standing in the doorway of her parents’ breakfast room.