The Fourth Protocol

He recalled the remark he had made at Kryuchkov’s dinner table and the thoughts that had prompted it. He knew what was going on, and what was intended, deep inside the heart of Britain’s Labour Party. Others had received the mass of raw intelligence that he had studied over the years and that was still passed to him as a sort of favor. But only he had been able to put all the pieces together, assembling them within the framework of the British mass psychology, to come up with the real picture. If he was going to do justice to the idea forming in his mind, he was going to have to describe that picture in words, to prepare for the Soviet leader one of the best pieces he had ever penned. At the weekend he could send Erita and the boys to the dacha. He would start, alone in the apartment, at the weekend. Before then, one last bender.

Jim Rawlings spent the hour between nine and ten that night sitting in another, smaller rented car outside Fontenoy House. He was dressed in a beautifully cut dinner jacket and attracted no attention. What he was studying was the pattern of lights high up in the apartment building. The flat he had targeted was of course in darkness, but he was happy to see that lights were on in the apartments above and below it. In each, to judge from the appearances of guests at the windows, New Year parties were getting under way.

At ten, with his car parked discreetly on a side street two blocks away, he sauntered through the front entrance of Fontenoy House. There had been so many people going in and out that the doors were closed but not locked. Inside the lobby, on the left-hand side, was the porter’s lodge, just as Billy Rice had said. Inside it the night porter was watching his Japanese portable television set. He rose and came to his doorway, as if to speak.

Rawlings was carrying a bottle of champagne decorated with a huge ribbon bow. He waved a hand in tipsy greeting.

“Evening,” he called, and added, “Oh, and Happy New Year.”

If the old porter was thinking of asking for the visitor’s identification or destination, he thought better of it. There were at least six parties going on in the building. Half of them seemed to be open house, so how was he to check guest lists?

“Oh ... er ... thank you, sir. Happy New Year, sir,” he called, but the dinner-jacketed back had gone down the corridor. The porter returned to his movie.

Rawlings used the stairs to the second floor, then the elevator to the eighth. At five past ten he was outside the door of the apartment he sought. As Billy had reported, there was no buzzer and the lock was a Chubb mortise. There was a secondary, self-closing Yale lock, for everyday use, twenty inches above the Chubb.

The Chubb mortise has a total of seventeen thousand computations and permutations. It is a five-lever lock but for a good key man not an insuperable problem, since only the first two and a half levers need to be ascertained; the other two and a half are the same but in reverse, so that the owner’s key will operate equally well when introduced from the other side of the door.

After leaving school at sixteen, Rawlings had spent ten years working with and under his uncle Albert in the latter’s hardware shop. It was a good front for the old man, himself a notable safecracker in his day. It gave the eager young Rawlings access to every known lock on the market and to most of the smaller safes. After ten years of endless practice, and with Uncle Albert’s expert coaching, Rawlings could take just about any lock in manufacture.

From his trouser pocket he produced a ring of twelve skeleton keys, all made up in his own workshop. He selected and tested three, one after the other, and settled for the sixth on the ring. Inserting it into the Chubb, he began to detect the pressure points inside the lock. Then, using a flat pack of slim steel files from his top pocket, he started to work on the softer metal of the skeleton key. Within ten minutes he had the first two and a half levers—the configuration, or profile, that he needed. In another fifteen minutes he had reproduced the same lever pattern in reverse. Inserting the finished skeleton key into the Chubb lock, he turned it slowly and carefully.

It went fully back. He waited for sixty seconds, just in case Billy’s tamp of Plasticine and Super Glue had not held inside the doorjamb. No bells. He let out a sigh and went to work on the Yale with a fine steel spike. That took sixty seconds, and the door swung quietly open. It was dark inside, but the light from the corridor gave him the outlines of the empty hallway. It was about eight feet square and carpeted.