The Fourth Protocol

In fact it does exist but is so small and so discreet that if anyone surveying the groves of academe in the British Isles were to blink, he would probably miss it. Its Hall is small, elegant, and tucked away out of sight; it offers no degree courses, educates no students, has no undergraduates and therefore no graduates, and awards no degrees. It has a few resident professors and fellows, who sometimes dine together in Hall but live in rooms scattered around the city, and others who live elsewhere and simply visit. It occasionally invites outsiders to address the fellows—an extraordinary honor—and the professors and fellows occasionally submit papers to the higher echelons of the British establishment, where they are taken very seriously. Its funding is as private as the profile it maintains.

In fact it is a think tank where assembled intellects, often with extensive nonacademic experience, pursue the study of one single discipline: current affairs.

That evening, Sir Nigel dined in Hall with his host, Professor Jeremy Sweeting, and after an excellent repast the professor took the Master back to his rooms in an agreeable house on the outskirts of Oxford for port and coffee.

“Now, Nigel,” said Professor Sweeting when they had broached a vintage Taylor and were at ease before the fire in the study, “what can I do for you?”

“Have you by any chance, Jeremy, heard of a thing called the MBR?”

Professor Sweeting held his port in midair. He stared at it fiar a long while. “You know, Nigel, you really do have a way of spoiling a chap’s evening when you have a mind to. Where did you hear those letters?”

For answer, Sir Nigel Irvine passed over the Preston report. Professor Sweeting read it carefully, and it took him an hour. Irvine knew that the professor, unlike John Preston, was no legman. He did not get out on the ground. But he had an encyclopedic knowledge of Marxian theory and practice, of dialectical materialism, and of the teachings of Lenin on the applicability of theory to the practice of the achievement of power. His pursuit and his absorption was to read, study, collate, and analyze.

“Remarkable,” said Sweeting as he handed back the report. “A different approach, a different attitude, of course, and a completely different methodology. But we’ve come up with the same answers.”

“Care to tell me what those answers are?” asked Sir Nigel gently.

“It’s only theory, of course,” apologized Professor Sweeting. “A thousand straws in the wind that may—or may not—make up a bale of hay. Anyway, this is what I’ve been on since June 1983. ...”

He talked for two hours, and when, much later, Sir Nigel left to be driven back to London, he was a very pensive man.

* * *

The

Akademik Komarov

was tied up at the Finnieston Quay in the heart of Glasgow, so that the giant crane there could hoist the pumps aboard in the morning. There are no customs or immigration checks there; foreign seamen can simply walk off their ships, across the quay, and into the streets of Glasgow.

At midnight, while Professor Sweeting was still talking, deckhand Semyonov walked down the gangplank, followed the quay for a hundred yards, avoided Betty’s Bar, outside whose door a few drunken sailors were still protesting their right to just one more drink, and turned up Finnieston Street.

He was unremarkable in appearance, being dressed in a turtleneck sweater, corduroy trousers, and an anorak; his shoes were scuffed. Under one arm he clutched a canvas gunnysack held closed by a drawstring. Passing under the Clydeside Expressway, he reached Argyle Street, turned left, and followed it to Partick Cross. He consulted no map but headed on into Hyndland Road. A mile farther on, he reached another major artery, the Great Western Road. He had memorized his route days before.

Here he checked his watch; it told him he still had half an hour. The rendezvous could not be more than ten minutes’ walk ahead. He turned left and proceeded in the direction of the Pond Hotel, next to the boating lake and a hundred yards past the BP service station whose lights he could see blazing in the distance. He was almost at the bus stop at the junction of the Great Western and Hughenden roads when he saw them. They were lounging about in the passenger shelter of the bus stop. It was half past one in the morning, and there were five of them.

In some parts of Britain they call them “skinheads” or “punks,” but in Glasgow they call them “Neds.” Semyonov thought of crossing the street but he was too late. One of them called out to him, and they spilled out of the bus shelter. He could speak some English, but their broad, drink-slurred Glaswegian dialect defeated him. They blocked the sidewalk, so he stepped into the street. One of them grabbed his arm and shouted at him.

What the lout actually said was “Wha’ ha’ ya got in ya wee sack, then?”