“Fair enough,” conceded Sir Nigel. “And so?”
“And so I believe there was an intended recipient of that disk of polonium, either directly through a rendezvous or indirectly by dead drop. That means there’s an illegal here, on the ground. I think we should try to find him.”
Sir Nigel pursed his lips. “If he’s a top illegal, finding him will be a needle-in-a-haystack affair,” he murmured.
“Yes, I know that.”
“If you had not been sent on compulsory leave, what would you have sought authority to do?”
“I think, Sir Nigel, that one disk of polonium is of no use to anybody. Whatever the illegal is up to, there must be other components. Now, it seems that whoever mounted the Semyonov incursion has taken a policy decision not to use the Soviet Embassy’s diplomatic bag. I don’t know why—it would have been much easier to ship a small, lead-lined package into Britain in the embassy bag and have one of their Line N people leave it at a dead drop for collection by the man on the ground. So I ask myself why they didn’t just do that. And the short answer is, I don’t know.”
“Right,” conceded Sir Nigel, “and so?”
“So if there has been one consignment—useless in itself—there must be others. Some may have already arrived. On the law of averages, there must be more yet to come. And apparently they are coming in via ‘mules,’ who pose as harmless seamen and God knows what else besides.”
“And you would want to do—what?” asked Sir Nigel.
Preston took a deep breath. “I would have wanted”—he stressed the conditional—“to check back on all entrants from the Soviet Union over the past forty, fifty, even one hundred days. We could not count on another mugging by hooligans, but there might have been some other incident. I would have tightened up controls on all entrants from the USSR, and even from the whole East Bloc, to see if we could intercept another component. As head of C5(C) I could have done that.”
“And you think now that you won’t get the chance?”
Preston shook his head. “Even if I were allowed to go back to work tomorrow, I’m pretty certain I would be off the case. Apparently I’m an alarmist and I make waves.”
Sir Nigel nodded pensively. “Poaching between the services is not regarded as terribly good form,” he said, as if thinking aloud. “When I asked you to go down to South Africa for me, it was Sir Bernard who sanctioned it. Later I learned that the assignment, however temporary, had caused—how shall I put it?—some hostility in certain quarters at Charles Street.
“Now, I don’t need an open quarrel with my sister service. On the other hand, I take a view, shared by yourself, that there might be more to this iceberg than the tip. In short, you have four weeks’ leave. Would you be prepared to spend that time working on this case?”
“For whom?” asked Preston, bewildered.
“For me,” said Sir Nigel. “You couldn’t come to Sentinel. You’d be seen. Word would get around.”
“Then where would I work?”
“Here,” said C. “It’s small but comfortable. I have the authority to ask for exactly the same information as you would if you were at your desk. Any incident involving a Soviet or East Bloc arrival will have been recorded, either on paper or in a computer. Since you cannot get to the files or the computer, I can arrange for the files and printouts to be brought to you. What do you say?”
“If Charles Street finds out, I’m finished at Five,” said Preston. He was thinking of his salary, of his pension, of the chances of getting another job at his age, of Tommy.
“How much longer do you think you have got at Charles under its present management?” asked Sir Nigel.
Preston laughed shortly. “Not long,” he said. “All right, sir, I’ll do it. I want to stay on this case. There’s something buried in there somewhere.”
Sir Nigel nodded approvingly. “You’re a tenacious man, John. I like tenacity. It usually yields results. Be here on Monday at nine. I’ll have two of my own lads waiting for you. Ask them for what you want, and they’ll get it.”
On Monday morning, April 20, as Preston started work in the Chelsea flat, an internationally famous Czech concert pianist arrived at Heathrow Airport from Prague, en route to his Wigmore Hall concert the following evening.
The airport authorities had been alerted, and in deference to the musician’s venerability, customs and immigration formalities were as little onerous as possible. The elderly pianist was met after the customs hall by a representative of the sponsoring organization and, with his small entourage, was whisked off to his suite at the Cumberland Hotel.
His retinue consisted of his dresser, who looked after his clothes and other personal effects with dedicated devotion; a female secretary who handled his fan mail and correspondence; and his personal aide, a tall, lugubrious man named Lichka, who took care of finances and negotiations with host organizations, and seemed to live on a diet of antacid tablets.
That Monday, Lichka was working his way through an abnormally large number of his pills. He had not wanted to do what was required of him, but the men from the StB had been extremely persuasive. No one in his right mind deliberately affronted the men of the StB, Czechoslovakia’s secret police and intelligence organization, or wished to be invited for further discussions at their headquarters, the dreaded “Monastery.” The men had made plain that Lichka’s granddaughter’s admission to the university would be so much easier to arrange if he were prepared to help them—a polite way of saying the girl did not stand a chance of entering if he failed them.
When they had given him back his shoes, he could find no trace of interference, and according to instructions had worn them on the flight and straight through Heathrow Airport.
That evening, a man walked up to the reception desk and politely asked the number of Lichka’s room. Equally politely he was given it. Five minutes later, at the precise hour Lichka had been briefed to expect it, there was a soft knock at his door. A piece of paper was pushed under it. He checked the identification code, opened the door five inches, and passed out a plastic bag containing his shoes. Unseen hands took the bag and Lichka closed the door. When he had flushed the scrap of paper down the toilet, he sighed with relief. It had been easier than he had expected. Now, he thought, we can get on with the business of making music.
Before midnight, in a backwater of Ipswich, the shoes joined the plaster cast and the radio in a bottom drawer. Courier Four had delivered.
Sir Nigel Irvine visited Preston at the Chelsea apartment on Friday afternoon. The MI5 man was looking exhausted, and the flat was awash with files and computer printout paper.
He had spent five days and had come up with nothing. He had started with every entry into Britain from the USSR over the past forty days. There had been hundreds: trade delegates, industrial buyers, journalists, trade-union stooges, a choir group from Georgia, a dance troupe of Cossacks, ten athletes and all their entourage, and a team of doctors for a medical conference in Manchester. And those were just the Russians.
Also entering from the Soviet Union were the returning tourists: the culture-vultures who had been admiring the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, the school party that had been singing in Kiev, and the “peace” delegation that had been providing rich fodder for the Soviet propaganda machine by condemning its own country at press conferences in Moscow and Kharkov.
Even that list did not include the Aeroflot crews who had been shuttling in and out as part of the normal air traffic, so First Officer Romanov hardly rated a mention.
There was, of course, no reference to a Dane coming into Birmingham from Paris and leaving through Manchester.
By Wednesday, Preston had had two options; stay with entrants from the USSR but go back sixty days, or widen the net to take in all entrants from any East Bloc country. That meant thousands and thousands of arrivals. He had decided to stay with his forty-day time scale but to include the non-Soviet Communist states. The paperwork began to get waist-high.
Customs had
been most helpful. There had been some confiscations, but always for an excess of the duty-free allowance. Nothing of inexplicable character had been seized. Immigration had come up with no “bent” passports, but that was to be expected. The weird and wonderful bits of paperwork sometimes proffered at passport control by people from the Third World were never produced by people from the Communist bloc. Not even time-expired passports, the usual reason for an immigration officer’s stopping a visitor from entry. In Communist countries a traveler’s passport was so thoroughly checked before departure that there was little chance of his being detained at the British end.
“And that,” said Preston gloomily, “still leaves the uncheckables—the merchant seamen, entering without controls at more than twenty commercial ports; the crews from the fishing factory ships now riding off Scotland; the commercial aircrews, who are hardly checked at all; and those with diplomatic cover.”
“As I thought,” said Sir Nigel. “Not easy. Have you any idea what you are looking for?”
“Yes, sir. I had one of your lads spend Monday out at Aldermaston with the people in nuclear engineering. It seems that disk of polonium would be suitable for a device that was small, crude, basic in design, and not very powerful—if one can describe any atomic bomb as ‘not very powerful.’ ” He handed Sir Nigel a list of items. “Those are, at a guess, something like what we are looking for.”
C studied the list of artifacts. “Is that all it takes?” he asked at length.
“In kit form, apparently, yes. I’d no idea they could be made so basic. Apart from the fissionable core and the steel tamper, that stuff could be hidden almost anywhere and excite no attention.”
“All right, John, where do you go now?”
“I’m looking for a pattern, Sir Nigel. It’s all I can look for. A pattern of entries and exits by the same passport number. If one or two couriers are being used, they would have to come in and out frequently, using different entry and exit points, probably different departure points abroad; but if a pattern shows up, we could put out an all-nation alert for a limited group of passport numbers. It’s not much, but it’s all I have.”
Sir Nigel rose. “Keep at it, John. I’ll get you access to anything you ask for. Let’s just pray whoever we are dealing with slips up, just once, by using the same courier twice or three times.”
But Major Volkov was more efficient than that. He did not slip up. He had no idea what the components were or what they were to be used for. He simply knew he had been ordered to ensure their entry into Britain in time for a series of rendezvous, that each courier would have memorized his primary and backup meets, and that nothing was to pass through the KGB rezidentura in the London embassy.
He had nine cargoes to infiltrate and twelve couriers prepared. Some, he knew, were not professionals, but where their cover was impeccable and their journey had been arranged weeks or months earlier, as in the case of Lichka the Czech, he had homed in on them.
In order not to alert Major General Borisov by stripping him of a further twelve illegals and their legends, he had cast his net wider than the USSR by calling on three of the sister services: the StB of Czechoslovakia, the SB of Poland, and, most of all, the obedient and unquestioning Haupt Verwaltung Aufklärung (HVA) of East Germany.
The East Germans were particularly good. While there are Polish and Czech communities in West Germany, France, and Britain, the East Germans had one great advantage. Because of the ethnic identicality of East and West Germans, and the feet that millions of former Easterners had already fled to West Germany, the HVA, from its East Berlin base, ran by far a greater number of in-place illegals in the West than any other East Bloc service.
Volkov had decided to use only two Russians, and they would be the first to go in. He had no way of knowing that one would be mugged by street thugs, nor was he aware that the false seaman’s consignment was no longer locked up in a Glasgow police station. He just took treble precautions because that was his nature and his training.
For his remaining seven cargoes he was using one courier supplied by the Poles, two by the Czechs (including Lichka), and four by the East Germans. The tenth courier, replacing the dead Courier Two, would also come from the Poles. For the structural alterations that he needed to make to two motor vehicles, Volkov was even using a garage and workshop run by the HVA in Brunswick, West Germany.
Only the two Russians and the Czech, Lichka, would have East Bloc departure points; plus, now, the tenth, who would have to come from the Polish Airline, LOT.
Volkov was simply not allowing the appearance of any of the patterns Preston now sought in his sea of paperwork in Chelsea.
Sir Nigel Irvine, like so many who have to work in central London, tried to get away at the weekends for a breath of fresh air. He and Lady Irvine stayed in London during the week but kept a small, rustic cottage in southeast Dorset, on the Isle of Purbeck, at a village called Langton Matravers.
That Sunday C had donned a tweed coat and hat, taken a thick ash stick, and walked down the lanes and tracks to the cliffs above Chapman’s Pool at St. Alban’s Head. The sun was bright but the wind chilly. It blew the silver wisps of hair that escaped his hat away over his ears like small wings. He took the cliff path and walked deep in thought, occasionally pausing to stare out over the tossed whitecaps of the English Channel.
He was thinking of the conclusions of Preston’s original report and of the remarkable concurrence of Sweeting in his Oxford reclusiveness. Coincidence? Straws in the wind? Grounds for conviction? Or just a lot of nonsense from a too-imaginative civil servant and a fanciful academic?
And if it was all true, could there be any link with a small disk of polonium from Leningrad that had arrived uninvited in a Glasgow police station?
If the metal disk was what Wynne-Evans had said, what did that signify? Could it possibly mean that someone, far out over those tossing waves, was really trying to breach the Fourth Protocol?
And if that was true, who could that someone be? Chebrikov and Kryuchkov of the KGB? They would never dare act except under the orders of the General Secretary. And if the General Secretary was behind it all—why?
And why not use the diplomatic bag? So much simpler, easier, safer. To this last question, he thought he could discern an answer. Using the embassy bag would mean using the KGB rezidentura inside the embassy. Better than Chebrikov, Kryuchkov, or the General Secretary, C knew that the rezidentura had been penetrated. He had his source Andreyev inside it.
The General Secretary, C suspected, had good reason to be shaken by the recent spate of defections from the KGB. All the evidence coming across was that the disillusionment at every level in Russia had become so profound that it was even affecting the elite of elites. Apart from the defections, starting in the late 1970s and growing through the 1980s there had been mass expulsions of Soviet diplomats across the world, caused in part by their own desperation to recruit agents, but leading to even further desperation as the diplomatic controllers were compelled to leave and the networks fell into disarray. Even Third World countries that, a decade ago, had danced to the Soviet tune were now asserting themselves and expelling Soviet agents for grossly undiplomatic conduct.
Yes, a major operation conducted outside the auspices of the KGB made sense. Sir Nigel had heard on good authority that the General Secretary was becoming paranoid about the level of Western penetration of the KGB itself. For every traitor who runs over, went the adage in the intelligence community, you can bet there’s another one still in place.
So, there was a man out there, running couriers and their cargoes into Britain, dangerous cargoes, bringing anarchy and chaos in a manner that C could not yet discern but was ceasing to doubt, even as he walked. And that man worked for another man, very high, who had no love for this small island.
“But you won’t find them, John,” he murmured to the unheeding wind. “You’re good, but they are better. And they hold the aces.”
Sir Nigel Irvine was one of the last
of the old grandees, one of a passing breed, being replaced at every level of his society by new men of a different type, even at the highest stratum of the civil service, where continuity of style and type was something of a household god.
So he gazed out at the Channel, as so many Englishmen had done before him, and made his decision. He was not convinced of the existence of a threat to the land of his forefathers, only of the possibility of such a menace. But that was enough.
Farther along the coast, on the downs above the small Sussex port of Newhaven, another man gazed at the tossing waves of the English Channel.
He was dressed in black leather, his helmet on the seat of his parked BMW motorcycle. A few Sunday strollers walked with their children across the downs, but they took no notice of him.
He was watching the approach of a ferry, well over the horizon and beating her way toward the shelter of the harbor mole. The Cornouailles would arrive from Dieppe in thirty minutes. Somewhere on board should be Courier Five.
In fact, Courier Five was on the foredeck, watching the approach of the English coast. He was one of those who had no car, but his ticket was for the boat train right through to London.
Anton Zelewski, his passport said, and it was perfectly accurate. A West German passport, the immigration officer noted, but there was nothing odd in that. Hundreds of thousands of West Germans have Polish-sounding names. He was passed through.
Customs examined his suitcase and his bag with the duty-free allowance, bought on board the ship. His bottle of gin and his twenty-five cigars in an unopened box were within the permitted limits. The customs officer nodded him through and turned his attention to someone else.
Zelewski had indeed bought a box of twenty-five good cigars in the duty-free shop on the Cornouailles. He had then retired to a bathroom, locked himself in, and eased the identifying duty-free labels off the newly bought box, only to stick them on an identical box he had brought with him. The other went overboard into the waiting sea.