The Fourth Protocol

“Pienaar claims he would like to know as much as we would,” answered C. “In fact, he has agreed to my request to receive our investigator to carry out a joint hunt with his own people. I want to send a man down there.”

“What is the position on Berenson and Marais now?” asked Sir Anthony Plumb of Harcourt-Smith, who was representing Five.

“Both men are under discreet surveillance, but no moves have been made to close in.

No break-in to either man’s apartment. Just mail intercept, phone tap, and the watchers around the clock,” replied Harcourt-Smith.

“How long do you want, Nigel?” asked Plumb.

“Ten days.”

“All right, but that’s the limit. In ten days we have to move against Berenson with whatever we have got and start into damage assessment, with his willing or unwilling cooperation.”

The next day, Sir Nigel Irvine called Sir Bernard Hemmings at his home outside Farnham, where the ailing man was confined.

“Bernard, that man of yours, Preston. I know it’s unusual—could send one of my own people, and all that—but I like his style. Could I borrow him for the South African Trip?”

Sir Bernard agreed. Preston flew to Johannesburg on the overnight flight of March 12-13. It was not until he was airborne that the information reached the desk of Brian Harcourt-Smith. He was icily angry, but knew he had been outranked.

The Albion Committee reported to the General Secretary on the evening of the twelfth, and was received in his apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

“And what, pray, have you got for me?” the Soviet leader asked quietly.

Professor Krilov, as chairman of the committee, gestured toward Grand Master Rogov, who opened the file in front of him and began to read.

As always in the presence of the General Secretary, Philby was impressed, even awed, by the sheer untrammeled power of the man. During the committee’s researches the mere mention of his name as the overriding authority could have secured them anything they wanted in the USSR and no questions asked. As a student of power and its application, Philby admired the ruthless and cunning way in which the General Secretary had secured absolute control over every tendril of life in the Soviet Union.

Years earlier, when he had been given the powerful chairmanship of the KGB, it had not been as an appointee of Brezhnev, but of the unpublicized kingmaker of the Politburo, the Party ideologue Mikhail Suslov. With this residual independence from Brezhnev and his personal “Mafia,” he had ensured that the KGB never became Brezhnev’s unquestioning poodle. When, in May 1982, with Suslov dead and Brezhnev dying, he had quit the KGB to return to the Central Committee, he had not made the same mistake.

Behind him as Chairman of the KGB he had left his own man, General Fedorchuk.

From inside the Party, the present General Secretary had consolidated his position with the Central Committee and then bided his time through the brief Andropov and Chernenko eras until his eventual succession. Within months of that accession, he had sewn up the power sources: Party, armed forces, KGB, Interior Ministry, MVD. With all the aces in his hands, no one dared oppose or conspire against him.

“We have devised a plan, Comrade General Secretary,” said Dr. Rogov, using, as they were among others, the formal term of address. “It is a concrete plan, an active measure, a proposal to cause a destabilization among the British people that would make the Sarajevo affair and the Berlin Reichstag fire pale into insignificance. We have called it Plan Aurora.”

It took him an hour to read the full details. He glanced up occasionally to see if there was any reaction, but the General Secretary was a grand master in a much bigger game of chess and his face remained blank. At last Dr. Rogov had finished. There was silence while they waited.

“It has risks,” said the General Secretary quietly. “What guarantees are there that it will not backfire like certain ... other operations?”

They all knew what he meant. He had been badly shaken by the dismal failure of the Wojtyla Affair. It had taken three years for the rumbles and accusations to die away, and it had caused the sort of global publicity the USSR definitely did not need.

In the early spring of 1981, the Bulgarian Secret Service had reported that their people among the Turkish community in West Germany had trawled a strange fish. For ethnic, cultural, and historical reasons, the Bulgars, most loyal and subservient of Russia’s satellites, were deeply involved in Turkey and the Turks. The man they had picked up was a dedicated terrorist killer who had been trained by the Ultra Left in Lebanon, had killed for the Ultra-Right Gray Wolves in Turkey, escaped from prison, and fled to West Germany.

The odd thing about him was that he had expressed a personal obsession to kill the Pope. Should they throw Mehmet Ali Agca back to the ocean or give him funds and false papers, along with a gun, and let him run?