The Fourth Protocol

She was fifty and they had been married twenty-eight years. It had been a good marriage, considering the job he did, and she had been a good wife. Like others who had married officers of the FCD, she had long since lost count of the evenings she had waited up for him while he had been buried in the cipher room of an embassy on foreign soil.

She had stuck it through the endless tedium of countless diplomatic cocktail parties, although she spoke no foreign language, while her husband made the rounds, elegant, affable, fluent in English, French, and German, doing his job under embassy cover.

She had lost count of the weeks she had spent alone when the children were small and he was a junior officer, their home a tiny and cramped apartment without any daily help, and he away on a course, or an assignment, or standing in the shadows by the Berlin Wall waiting for a bagman to come home to the East.

She had known the panic and nameless fear that even the innocent feel when, at a certain foreign station, one of Karpov’s colleagues had gone over to the West, and the KR (counterintelligence) people had grilled her for hours about anything the man or his wife might have said in her hearing. She had watched in pity as the defector’s wife, a woman she had known well but now dared not approach, was escorted out to the waiting Aeroflot plane. It went with the job, Karpov had said, as he comforted her.

That had been years before. Now her Zhenia was a general; the Moscow apartment was airy and spacious; she had made the dacha lovely in the way she knew he liked, with pine and rugs, comfortable but rustic. The two boys were a credit to them; both at the university, one to be a doctor, the other a physicist. There would be no more horrid embassy apartments, and in three years he could retire with honors and a good pension.

So, if he had to have a bit of skirt one evening a week, he was no different from most of his contemporaries. It was better, perhaps, this way than if he had been a drunken brute, like some, or a passed-over major going nowhere but to one of the godforsaken Asian republics to end his career. Still, she sighed inwardly.

Partick police station is not the most glamorous edifice in the fine city of Glasgow, but Carmichael and Preston were not on an architectural tour. They were interested in the

“productions” from the previous night’s mugging/suicide, which had entered the station’s routine. The duty sergeant handed the desk to a constable and led them to the rear, where he unlocked the door to a room stacked with filing cabinets. With no expression of surprise, he accepted Carmichael’s card and his explanation that he and his colleague had to check the productions in order to complete their own reports, the dead man being a foreign seaman and all that. The sergeant knew about reports; he spent half his life filling them in. But he declined to leave the room while they opened the bags and looked over the contents.

Preston started with the shoes, checking for false heels, detachable soles, or cavities in the toecaps. Nothing. The socks took less time, as did the underpants. He had the back off the shattered wristwatch, but it was just a wristwatch. The trousers took longer; he felt all the seams and hems, looking for new stitching or a thickness that could not be accounted for by a double layer of the fabric. Nothing.

The turtleneck sweater the man had been wearing was easy; there were no seams and no hidden papers or hard lumps. He spent much longer on the anorak, but it yielded no fruit, either. By the time he got to the gunny-sack he was more convinced than before that if the mysterious Comrade Semyonov had had something with him, the answer lay here.

He started with the rolled-up sweater that had been in it, more for elimination purposes than anything. It was clean. Then he began on the sack itself. It took half an hour before he was satisfied that the base was just a double-stitched disk of canvas, the sides were of single canvas, and the eyelets at the top were not miniature transmitters or the drawstring a secret aerial.

That left the tobacco tin. It was of Russian origin, an ordinary screw-top tin that still smelled faintly of pungent tobacco. The cotton was cotton, and that left three metal disks: two shiny, like aluminum, and light in weight; the other dull and heavy, like lead. He sat staring at them for a while as they lay on the table; Carmichael looked at him, and the sergeant looked at the floor.