The Fourth Protocol

Craig grinned. He felt through the pockets of the anorak and extracted a seaman’s paybook. It bore the photograph of the man in the examination room across the way, and was in two languages, Russian and French. He understood neither. He could not read Cyrillic script, but the name was in Roman letters also, in the French-language section.

“Who’s the patient?” asked the nurse, preparing two cups of tea.

“Looks like a seaman, and a Russian at that,” said Craig, perturbed. A citizen of Glasgow roughed up by a gang of Neds was one thing; a foreigner—and a Russian, at that—could spell problems. To try to discover what ship the man could be from, Craig emptied the gunnysack. It contained simply a rolled-up, thick-knit sweater, which was wrapped around a circular, screw-top tobacco tin. Inside the tin was not tobacco but a wad of cotton that shrouded two disks of aluminum with, between them, another two-inch-diameter disk of a dull gray metal. Craig examined the three disks without interest, replaced them in their bed of cotton, screwed the tin shut again, and laid it on the table beside the paybook. What he did not know was that across the corridor the victim of the mugging attack had come to and was peering through the curtains at him. What he did know was that it was time to tell Division that he had an injured Russian on his hands.

“Use your phone, pet?” he asked the nurse, and reached out for it.

“Don’t you ‘pet’ me,” called back the nurse, who was somewhat older than the twenty-four-year-old Craig. “God, they get younger every day.”

Craig began to dial. Just what went through Konstantin Semyonov’s mind will never be known. Dazed and confused, probably suffering a concussion from the kicks to his head, he could see the unmistakable black uniform of a British policeman with his back to him across the corridor. He could see his own paybook and the consignment he had been told to bring to Britain and deliver to the agent at the boating lake sitting on the table by the policeman’s hand. He had watched the officer examine the consignment—

Semyonov himself had never dared open the tobacco tin—and now the man was phoning.

Perhaps the seaman had visions of an endless third-degree examination in some reeking cellar beneath Strathclyde police headquarters. ...

The first thing Craig knew, he was roughly elbowed aside, caught completely unawares. A bare arm pushed past him, reached for the tin, and grabbed it. Craig responded quickly, dropping the telephone and grasping the outstretched arm. “What the hell!” he shouted; then, assuming the poor fellow was hallucinating, he grabbed the man and tried to restrain him. The tin was shaken from the Russian’s hand and fell to the floor. For a moment Semyonov stared at the Scottish policeman, then panicked and ran.

Still calling, “Hey, come back here!” Craig thundered down the corridor after him.

Shortie Patterson was a drunk. A lifetime dedicated to sampling the produce of Scotland had made him unemployed and unemployable. He was no ordinary drunk; he had elevated intoxication to an art form. The previous day he had drawn his welfare allowance and gone to the nearest boozer; by midnight he had been paralyzed. In the small hours he had taken exception to the offensive attitude of a lamppost that refused to respond to his entreaties for the price of a dram, so he had hit the creature.

He had been in X-Ray with his broken hand and was going back down the corridor to his cubicle when a man with a bare and battered torso and bruised and bloody face came running out of an adjacent room pursued by a policeman. Shortie knew his duty to a fellow sufferer. He had no love for policemen, who seemed to have nothing better to do than pluck him out of perfectly comfortable gutters and hand him over to people who made him bathe. He let the running man pass him, then stuck out a foot.

“You stupid wee bugger!” shouted Craig as he crashed down. By the time he was up, he had lost ten yards on the Russian.

Semyonov came through the mirrored doors into the public waiting room, missed seeing the narrow door to the outside that lay to his left, and ran through the larger double doors to his right. This led him back into the corridor down which he had been wheeled thirty minutes earlier. He turned right again, to find approaching him a gurney surrounded by a doctor and two nurses holding up plasma bottles—Dr. Mehta’s accident victim. The gurney blocked the whole corridor; behind him Semyonov heard running boots.

To his left was a lobby containing two elevators. The door to one was just closing, and Semyonov managed to hurl himself through the gap. As the elevator rose, he heard the policeman banging impotently on the closed door. Semyonov leaned back and closed his eyes in misery.

Craig made for the stairwell and ran up. At every level he checked the lights above the elevator doors. It was still climbing. At the top and tenth floor he was hot, angry, and puffing.