The Fourth Protocol

Sergeant Cook was confident, and rightly so, that if any of the forest of aerials above him picked up an electronic whisper, it would pass that whisper to the banks of computers below. The scanning of the bands was automatic and the recording of any whisper in the ether that should not be there equally automatic. If such a whisper occurred, the eternally watchful computer would trigger its own hit button deep inside its own multicolored entrails, record the transmission, take an immediate bearing on its source, instruct other, brother computers across the country to take a crossbearing, and alert Sergeant Cook.

At 11:43 p.m., something caused the master computer to operate its own hit button.

Something or someone had transmitted what was not expected, and out of the whirling kaleidoscope of electronic signals that fill the air of this planet twenty-four hours in every day, the computer had noticed and traced it. Sergeant Cook noted the warning signal and reached for a telephone.

What the computer had picked up was a “squirt,” a brief shriek of sound that lasted only a few seconds and would make no sense to the human ear. A squirt is the end product of quite a laborious procedure in the sending of clandestine messages. First the message is written out in clear and made as brief as possible. Then it is encoded, but it still remains a list of letters or figures. The encoded message is tapped out on a Morse key, not to a listening world but to a tape machine. The tape is then speeded up to an extreme degree, so that the dots and dashes that make up the transmission are telescoped, to emerge as a single screech lasting only a few seconds. When the transmitter is ready to go, the operator simply sends that single screech, then packs up his set and moves sharply somewhere else.

Within ten minutes that Saturday night, the triangulators had pinpointed the spot from which the screech had come. Other computers, at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire and Brawdy in Wales, had also caught the brief squirt transmission and taken a bearing. When the local police got there, the spot turned out to be the shoulder of a lonely road high in the Derbyshire Peak District. There was no one there.

In due course the message went to Cheltenham and was slowed down to a pace at which the dots and dashes could be transcribed into letters. But after twenty-four hours of going through the electronic brains called the code-breakers, the answer was still a big zero.

“It’s a sleeper transmitter, probably somewhere in the Midlands, and he’s gone to

‘active,’ ” the chief analyst reported to the Director-General of GCHQ. “But our man seems to be using a fresh one-time pad for every word. Unless we can have a lot more of it, we won’t break it.”

It was decided to keep a close watch on the channel the secret sender had used, though if he broadcast again he would almost certainly use a different channel.

A brief flimsy recording the incident went to the desks, among others, of Sir Bernard Hemmings and Sir Nigel Irvine.

The message had been received elsewhere, notably in Moscow. Decoded with a replica of the one-time pad used in a quiet backwater of Ipswich, the message told those interested that the man on the ground had completed all his preliminary tasks ahead of schedule and was ready to receive his first courier.

Chapter 12

The spring thaw would not be long in coming, but for the moment crusted snow hung on the branches of the birch and fir trees far below. From the spectacular double-glazed window on the seventh and top floor of the First Chief Directorate building at Yasyenevo, the man gazing at the landscape could make out, across the sea of winter trees, the tip of the western end of the lake where, in summer, the foreign diplomats from Moscow liked to come and disport themselves.

That Sunday morning, Lieutenant General Yevgeni Sergeivitch Karpov would have preferred to be with his wife and teenage children at their dacha at Peredelkino, but even when one has risen as high in the service as Karpov, there are some things that have to be taken care of personally. The arrival of the bagman due home from Copenhagen was such a matter. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly noon and the man was late. Turning from the window, he sighed and threw himself into the swivel chair behind his desk.

At fifty-seven, Yevgeni Karpov was at the pinnacle of promotion and power achievable by a professional intelligence officer within the KGB, or at least within the First Chief Directorate. Fedorchuk had gone higher, right up to the chairmanship itself, and on to the MVD, but that had been on the General Secretary’s coattails. Moreover, Fedorchuk had not been FCD; he rarely left the Soviet Union; he had made his bones crushing internal dissident and nationalist movements.