The Fourth Protocol

The second concern was his loyalty to Sir Bernard Hemmings. Preston had been in the service only six years, but the Old Man had been very good to him. He liked Sir Bernard and he knew the knives were out for the ailing Director-General.

The ultimate decision on who will be head of MI5 or Chief of MI6 in Britain lies with a committee of so-called Wise Men. In the case of MI5, these would normally be the Permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office (the ministry that controls Five), plus the PUS at Defense, the Cabinet Secretary, and the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

These would “recommend” a favored candidate to the Home Secretary and Prime Minister, the two senior politicians involved. It would be unusual for the politicians to decline the recommendation of the Wise Men.

But before they made a decision the mandarins would take soundings in their own inimitable way. There would be discreet lunches in clubs, drinks at bars, murmured discussions over coffee. In the case of the proposed Director-General of MI5, the Chief of the SIS would be consulted, but since Sir Nigel Irvine was himself moving close to retirement, he would need a very good reason for advising against a leading candidate for the other intelligence service. After all, he would not have to work with the man.

Among the most influential of the sources sounded out by the Wise Men would be the outgoing DG of Five himself. Preston knew that an honorable man like Sir Bernard Hemmings would feel bound to take a straw poll of his own heads of section throughout the six branches of the service. That straw poll would weigh heavily with him, whatever his personal feelings might be. Not for nothing had Brian Harcourt-Smith used his increasing dominance in the day-to-day running of the service to place one after another of his protégés at the head of the numerous sections.

Preston was in no doubt that Harcourt-Smith would like him to leave before the autumn, to follow two or three others who had gone into civilian life over the past twelve months.

“Sod him,” he remarked to no one in particular in a largely empty canteen. “I’ll stay.”

While Preston was at lunch, Petrofsky left the hotel, his luggage by now augmented by a large suitcase full of clothes that he had bought locally. He told the receptionist that he would be moving to the Norfolk area and that any mail arriving for him should be held pending collection. He rang the insurance broker in Colchester and learned that the temporary coverage for the motorcycle had been issued. The Russian asked the broker not to mail it; he would collect it himself. This he did immediately, and late that afternoon moved into 12 Cherryhayes Close. He spent part of the night working carefully with his one-time pads, preparing a coded message that no computer would break. Code-breaking, he knew, was based on patterns and repetitions, however sophisticated the computer used to crack the code. Using a one-time pad for each word of a short message left no patterns and no repetitions.

The next morning, Saturday, he drove to Thetford, garaged his car, and took a local taxi to Stowmarket. Here, with a certified check, he paid the balance of the price of the BMW, borrowed the toilet to change into his leathers and crash helmet, which he had brought in a canvas bag, stuffed the bag and his ordinary jacket, trousers, and shoes into the saddlebags, and rode away.

It was a long ride and took him many hours. It was not until late evening that he arrived back at Thetford, changed clothes, exchanged motorcycle for family sedan, and motored sedately back to Cherryhayes Close, Ipswich, where he arrived at midnight. He was not observed, but if he had been, it would have been as “that nice young Mr. Ross who moved into Number Twelve yesterday.”

On a Saturday evening, Master Sergeant Averell Cook of the U.S. Army would have preferred to be dating his girlfriend in nearby Bedford. Or even playing pool with friends in the commissary. Instead he was taking the swing shift at the joint British-American listening station at Chicksands.

The “head office” of the British electronic monitoring and code-breaking complex is at the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, in the south of England. But GCHQ has outstations in various parts of the country, and one of them, Chicksands, in Bedfordshire, is run jointly by GCHQ and the American National Security Agency.

The days when attentive men sat hunched into earphones trying to pick up and record the manual tapping of a Morse key operated by some German agent in Britain are long gone. In the business of listening, analyzing, filtering the innocent from the not-so-innocent, recording the latter, and decoding, computers have taken over.