A man who had spent half his life standing in the rain, Harry was quite content. He was warm, dry, had a large supply of mints, and had his shoes off. There were worse ways of watching, as he well knew. The target house even backed onto a fifteen-foot concrete wall, the football grounds, which meant no one need spend the night crouched in the bushes. Preston took the spare chair beside him, behind the mounted camera, and accepted a cup of tea from Ginger.
“Are you bringing up the covert-entry team?” Harry asked. He meant the skilled burglars that Technical Support maintained for clandestine break-ins.
“No,” said Preston. “For one thing, we don’t even know whether there is someone else in there as well. For another, there could be a range of warning devices to indicate that an entry has taken place, and we might not spot them all. Finally, what I’m waiting for is another Chummy to show up. When he does, we take the cars and tail him. Len can take over the house.”
They settled down in companionable silence. Barney woke up. “Anything on the telly?” he asked.
“Not much,” said Ginger. “The evening news. Usual rubbish.”
Twenty-four hours later, on Thursday evening at the same hour, the news was quite interesting. On their small screen they saw the Prime Minister standing on the steps of 10 Downing Street in a neat blue suit, facing a horde of press and television crews.
She announced she had just returned from Buckingham Palace, where she had asked for a dissolution of Parliament. In consequence, the country would prepare for a general election, to be held on June 18. The rest of the evening was devoted to the sensation, with the leaders and luminaries of all the parties announcing their confident expectation of victory.
“That’s one for the books,” Burkinshaw remarked to Preston. He could get no reply.
Lost in thought, Preston was staring at the screen. At last he said, “I think I’ve got it.”
“Well, don’t use our loo,” said Mungo.
“What’s that, John?” asked Harry when the laughter died down.
“My deadline,” said Preston, but he refused to elaborate.
* * *
By 1987 very few European-manufactured cars still retained the old-style large round headlights, but one that did was the evergreen Austin Mini. It was a vehicle of this type that was among the many cars to disembark on the evening of June 2 from the Cherbourg ferry arriving at Southampton.
The car had been bought in Austria four weeks earlier, driven to the clandestine garage in Germany, modified there, and driven back to Salzburg. The car had perfect Austrian papers, as did the tourist driving it, though he was in fact a Czech, the second and last of the contributions by the StB to Major Volkov’s plan to import into Britain the components Valeri Petrofsky needed.
The Mini was searched at customs, and nothing amiss was discovered. Clearing Southampton docks, the driver followed the directions he had been given until, in the northern suburbs of the port city, he pulled off the road into a large parking lot. It was quite dark already and at the rear of the lot he was out of sight of those still speeding down the main highway. He descended and with a screwdriver began to work on the headlights.
First he removed the chrome ring covering the gap between the headlight unit and the surrounding metal of the car’s fender. Using a larger screwdriver he then undid the screws holding the headlight firmly inside the fender. When they came free he eased the entire unit out of its socket, detached the wires that ran from the car’s electrical system into the rear of the lamp bowl, and laid the headlight, which appeared exceptionally heavy, in a canvas bag by his side.
It took almost an hour to extract both headlight units. When he had finished, the small car stared sightlessly ahead with empty sockets. In the morning, the agent knew, he would return with freshly purchased headlights from Southampton, fit them, and drive away.
For the moment he hefted the heavy canvas bag, went back to the highway, and walked three hundred yards back toward the port. The bus stop was where they had said it would be. He checked his watch; ten minutes to rendezvous.
Exactly ten minutes later, a man in motorcycle leathers strolled up to the bus stop. There was no one else there. The newcomer glanced down the road and remarked, “It’s always a long wait for the last bus of the night.”
The Czech sighed with relief. “Yes,” he replied, “but, thank God, I should be home by midnight.”
They waited in silence until the bus for Southampton arrived. The Czech left the canvas bag on the ground and boarded the bus. As the taillights disappeared toward the port city, the motorcyclist lifted the bag and walked back up the road to where he had left his motorcycle.
At dawn, haying ridden to Thetford to change clothes and switch vehicles, he arrived home in Cherryhayes Close, Ipswich, carrying the last of the scheduled list of components he had waited for these long weeks. Courier Nine had delivered.
Two days later, the stakeout on the house on Compton Street, Chesterfield, was one week old and had absolutely nothing to report.
The Stephanides brothers lived lives of impeccable uneventfulness. They rose at about nine, busied themselves about their house, where they appeared to do all their own cleaning and dusting, and left in their five-year-old car for their restaurant just before midday. They stayed there until close to midnight, when they returned home to sleep. There were no visitors and few phone calls. What calls there were involved orders for meat and vegetables or other harmless sundries.
Down at the restaurant at Holywell Cross, Len Stewart and his people reported much the same. The telephone was used more frequently, but again the talk was of orders for food, bookings for a table, or deliveries of wine. It was not possible for a watcher to dine there every night; the Greeks were apparently professionals who had spent years in the clandestine life and would have spotted a customer who came too frequently or loitered too long. But Stewart and his team did their best.
For the lads in the Royston house the main problem was boredom. Even Mr. and Mrs. Royston were tiring of the inconvenience caused by their presence after the initial excitement wore off. Royston had agreed to volunteer as a canvasser for the Conservative Party—he resolutely declined to assist anybody else—and the front windows of the house now bore posters in favor of the local Tory candidate.
This enabled more coming and going than usual, since anyone wearing a Conservative rosette seen leaving or entering the house would attract no attention from the neighbors. The ruse enabled Burkinshaw and his team, suitably rosetted, to take an occasional stroll while the Stephanides brothers were at their restaurant. It broke the monotony. The only one who seemed immune from boredom was Harry Burkinshaw.
For the rest, the principal distraction was television, kept at low volume, particularly when the Roystons were out, and the prime topic day and evening was the continuing election campaign. One week into the campaign, three things were becoming clear.
The Liberal/Social Democrat alliance had still failed to surge in the opinion polls and the issue seemed increasingly developing into the traditional race between the Conservatives and the Labour Party. The second factor was that all public-opinion polls indicated that the two main parties were much closer than could have been foreseen four years earlier, in 1983, when the Conservatives won a landslide; further, constituency-level polling indicated that the outcome in the eighty most marginal constituencies would almost certainly decide the color of the country’s next government. In every poll it was the “floating vote,” varying between ten and twenty percent, that held the balance.
The third development was that despite all the economic and ideological issues involved, and despite the efforts of all parties to make the most of them, the campaign was becoming increasingly dominated by the much more emotive issue of unilateral nuclear disarmament. In more and more polls the nuclear arms race issue was showing as the first or second priority of concern.
The pacifist movements, broadly Left and broadly united for once, were mounting what was in effe
ct a parallel campaign of their own. Huge demonstrations took place on an almost daily basis, rewarded with equally copious coverage by newspapers and television. The movements, while demonstrating no noticeable fund-raising organization, seemed able from their combined resources to hire hundreds of buses at commercial rates to transport their demonstrators hither and thither across the land.
Hard Left luminaries of the Labour Party, agnostics or atheists to a man, shared every public or TV platform with clerics of the trendier wing of the Anglican Church, where the members of one group spent their allocated air time nodding in grave agreement with the points made by the other.
Inevitably, even though the alliance was not unilateralist, the primary target of the disarmers was the Conservative Party, just as their primary ally became the Labour Party. The Party leader, supported by the National Executive, seeing which way the wind was blowing, publicly aligned himself and the Party to every one of the unilateralists’ demands.
Another theme that ran through the Left campaign was anti-Americanism. On a hundred platforms it rapidly became impossible for the interviewer or show host to extract from the disarmers’ spokesmen a single condemnatory word against Soviet Russia; the constantly reiterated theme was hatred of America, which was portrayed as warmongering, imperialistic, and a threat to world peace.
On Thursday, June 4, the campaign was enlivened by a sudden Soviet offer to “guarantee” to recognize the whole of Western Europe, neutrals and NATO nations alike, as a nuclear-free zone in perpetuity if America would do the same.
An attempt by the British Defense Minister to explain that (a) the removal of European-American defenses was verifiable while Soviet warhead detargeting was not, and (b) the Warsaw Pact had a four-to-one conventional-weapons superiority over NATO’s, was howled down twice before lunch, and the minister had to be removed from the grip of the pacifists by bodyguards.
“Anyone would think,” grumbled Harry Burkinshaw as he popped another mint, “that this election was a national referendum on nuclear disarmament.”
“It is,” said Preston sharply.
Friday found Major Petrofsky shopping in Ipswich. In an office-equipment shop he acquired a small steel cabinet, thirty inches tall, eighteen wide, and twelve deep, with a door that locked securely. From a hardware store he bought a light, short-handled, two-wheel dolly of the type used for shifting garbage cans or heavy suitcases. A lumber merchant yielded two ten-foot planks and a variety of laths, rods, and short joists, while a do-it-yourself shop sold him a complete toolbox including a high-speed drill with a selection of bits for steel or wood, plus nails, bolts, nuts, screws, a pair of heavy-duty industrial gloves, and several sheets of foam rubber. He rounded off the morning in an electrical-supply shop with the purchase of four nine-volt batteries and a selection of multicolored electrical wiring. It took two journeys in his hatchback sedan to bring the loads back to Cherryhayes Close, where he stored them in the garage. After dark he brought most of the gear inside the house.
That night the radio told him in Morse the details of the arrival of the assembler, the one event he had not been required to memorize. It would be Rendezvous X and the date Monday, the eighth. Tight, he thought, damn tight, but he would still be on target.
* * *
While Petrofsky was crouched over his one-time pad deciphering the message and the Stephanides brothers were serving moussaka and shish kebab to a line of people who had just left the nearby bars at closing time, Preston was in the police station, on the phone to Sir Bernard Hemmings.
“The question is, John, how long we can keep going up there in Chesterfield without any results,” said Sir Bernard.
“It’s only been a week, sir,” said Preston. “Stakeouts have lasted a lot longer.”
“Yes, I well know that. The thing is, we usually have more to go on. There’s a growing move here that advocates crashing in on the Greeks to see what it is they’ve got stashed away in that house, if anything. Why won’t you agree on a clandestine entry while they’re at work?”
“Because I think they’re top pros and they’d spot they’d been gone over. If that happened, they’d probably have a foolproof way of warning off their controller from ever visiting them again.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right. It’s all very well your sitting over that house like a tethered goat in India waiting for the tiger to come, but supposing the tiger doesn’t show?”
“I believe he will, sooner or later, Sir Bernard,” said Preston. “Please, give me a bit more time.”
“All right,” conceded Hemmings after a pause for a consultation at the other end. “A week, John. Next Friday I’ll have to jack up the Special Branch lads to go in there and take the place apart. Let’s face it, the man you’re looking for could have been inside there all the time.”
“I don’t believe he is. Winkler would never have visited the lair of the tiger himself. I believe he’s still out there somewhere, and that he’ll come.”
“Very well. One week, John. Friday next, it is.”
Sir Bernard hung up. Preston stared at the handset. The election was thirteen days away. He was beginning to feel dejected, that he could have been wrong all along. Nobody else, with the possible exception of Sir Nigel, believed in his hunch. A small disk of polonium and a low-level Czech bagman were not much to go on, and might not even be linked.
“All right, Sir Bernard,” he told the buzzing receiver, “one week. After that I’m packing it in, anyway.”
The Finnair jet from Helsinki arrived the following Monday afternoon, on time, as usual, and its complement of passengers passed through Heathrow without undue problems. One of them was a tall, bearded man of middle age whose Finnish passport claimed him to be Urho Nuutila, and whose fluent command of the language could be partly explained by his Karelian parentage. He was in fact a Russian named Vassiliev, by profession a scientist in nuclear engineering attached to the Soviet Army Artillery, Ordnance Research Directorate. He spoke passable English.
Having cleared customs, he took the airport courtesy bus to the Heathrow Penta Hotel, walked in through the front, kept going right past reception, and emerged at the rear door, which gave onto the parking lot. He waited by that door in the late-afternoon sunshine, unnoticed by anyone, until a small hatchback sedan drew abreast of him. The driver had his window open. “Is this where the buses from the airport drop the passengers?” he asked.
“No,” said the traveler. “I think that is around the front.”
“Where are you from?” asked the young man.
“Finland, actually,” said the bearded one.
“It must be cold in Finland.”
“No, at this time of year it is very hot. The main problem is the mosquitoes.”
The young man nodded. Vassiliev walked around the car and climbed in. They drove off.
“Name?” asked Petrofsky.
“Vassiliev.”
“That’ll do. Nothing more. I’m Ross.”
“Far to go?” asked Vassiliev.
“About two hours.”
They drove the rest of the way in silence. Petrofsky made three separate maneuvers to detect a tail, had there been one. They arrived at Cherryhayes Close by the last light of day. On the next-door patch of front lawn Petrofsky’s neighbor Mr. Armitage was mowing the grass.
“Company?” Armitage asked as Vassiliev descended from the car and walked to the front door.
Petrofsky took his guest’s single small suitcase from the back and winked at his neighbor. “Head office,” he whispered. “Best behavior. Might get promotion.”
“Oh, I should think so, then.” Armitage grinned and nodded in encouragement, and went on mowing.
Inside the sitting room, Petrofsky closed the curtains as he always did before putting on the light. Vassiliev stood motionless in the gloom. “Right,” he said when the lights went on. “To business. Have you got all nine consignments that were sent to you?”
“Yes. All nine.”
“Let?
??s confirm them. One child’s ball, weighing about twenty kilograms.”
“Check.”
“One pair shoes, one box cigars, one plaster cast.”
“Check.”
“One transistor radio, one electric shaver, one steel tube, extremely heavy.”
“That must be this.” Petrofsky went to a closet and held up a short length of heavy metal in heat-resistant cladding.
“It is,” said Vassiliev. “Finally, one handheld fire extinguisher, unusually heavy, and one pair car headlights, also very heavy.”
“Check.”
“Well, that’s it, then. If you’ve got the rest of the innocent commercial purchases, I’ll start assembling in the morning.”
“Why not now?”
“Look, young man. First of all, the sawing and drilling is hardly going to please the neighbors at this hour. Second, I’m tired. With this kind of toy you don’t make mistakes. I’ll start fresh tomorrow and be finished by sundown.”
Petrofsky nodded. “Take the back bedroom. I’ll run you to Heathrow on Wednesday in time for the morning flight.”
Chapter 20
Vassiliev elected to work in the sitting room, with the curtains closed and by electric light. First he asked for the nine consignments to be assembled.
“We’ll need a garbage bag,” he said. Petrofsky fetched him one from the kitchen.
“Pass the items to me as I ask for them,” said the assembler. “First, the cigar box.”
He broke open the seals and lifted the lid. The box contained two layers of cigars, thirteen on the top and twelve below; each cigar was wrapped in an aluminum tube.
“It should be third from the left, bottom row.”
It was. He emptied the cigar from its tube and slit it open with a razor. From the sliced tobacco inside he withdrew a slim glass phial with a crimped end and two twisted wires sticking out. An electrical detonator. The waste went into the bag.