Fourth Protocol

  “Plaster cast.”

  The cast had been made in two layers, the first allowed to harden before the second was applied. Between the two layers a sheet of gray, puttylike substance had been rolled flat, encased in polyethylene to prevent adhesion, and wrapped around the arm. Vassiliev prized the two layers of plaster of paris apart, peeled the gray substance from its cavity, pulled away the polyethylene protector sheets, and rolled it back into a ball. Half a pound of plastic explosive.

  Given Lichka’s shoes, he cut away the heels of both. From one came a steel disk two inches in diameter and one inch thick. Its rim was threaded to turn it into a broad, flat screw, and one surface had a deep cut to take a wide-headed screwdriver. From the other heel came a flatter, two-inch-wide disk of gray metal; it was lithium, an inert metal that, when bonded during the explosion to the polonium, would form the initiator and cause the atomic reaction to reach its full force.

  The complementary disk of polonium came from the electric shaver that had so worried Karel Wosniak, and replaced the one lost in Glasgow. There were five of the smuggled consignments left.

  The heat-resistant cladding on the exhaust pipe from the Hanomag truck was stripped away to reveal an eighteen-inch-long steel tube weighing twenty kilograms. It had an internal diameter of two inches, external four inches, for the metal’s thickness was one inch and it was of hardened steel. One end was flanged and threaded internally, the other capped with steel. The capping had a small hole in the center, capable of allowing the electrical detonator to be passed through it.

  From First Ofiïcer Romanov’s transistor radio Vassiliev extracted the timer device; a flat, sealed steel box, the size of two cigarette packs placed end to end. On one face it had two large round buttons, one red and one yellow; from the other side protruded two colored wires, negative and positive. Each corner had an earlike lug with a hole, for bolting to the outside of the steel cabinet that would contain the bomb.

  Taking the fire extinguisher that had arrived in Lundqvist’s Saab, the assembler unscrewed the base, which the preparation team had cut open, reassembled, and repainted to hide the seam. Out of the interior came not fire-damping foam but wadding, and last of all a heavy rod of leadlike metal, five inches long and two inches in diameter. Small though it was, it still weighed four and a half kilograms. Vassiliev pulled on the heavy gloves to handle it. It was pure uranium-235.

  “Isn’t that stuff radioactive?” asked Petrofsky, who was watching in fascination.

  “Yes, but not dangerously so. People think that all radioactive materials are dangerous to the same degree. Not so. Luminous watches are radioactive, but we wear them. Uranium is an alpha emitter, low-level. Now, plutonium—that’s really lethal. So is this stuff when it goes critical, as it will just before detonation—but not yet.”

  The pair of headlights from the Mini took a lot of stripping. Vassiliev took out the glass lamps, the filament inside, and the inner reflector bowl. What he was left with was a pair of extremely heavy semispherical bowls, each of one-inch-thick hardened steel. Each bowl had a flange around its rim, drilled with sixteen holes to take the nuts and bolts. Joined together, they would form a perfect globe.

  One of the bowls had at its base a two-inch-wide hole, threaded inside to accept the steel plug from Lichka’s left shoe. The other had a short stump of tube sticking out from its base; internally it was two inches wide, and it was flanged and threaded on its outer side to screw into the steel “gun” tube from the Hanomag’s exhaust system.

  The last item was the child’s ball, brought in by the camper van. Vassiliev cut away the bright rubberized skin. A ball of metal gleamed in the light.

  “That’s lead wrapping,” he said. “The ball of uranium, the fissionable core of the nuke, is inside. I’ll get it out later. It’s also radioactive, like that piece over there.”

  Having satisfied himself he had his nine components, he started work on the steel cabinet. Turning it on its back, he lifted the lid and with the wooden laths and rods prepared an inner frame in the form of a low cradle, which rested on the floor of the cabinet. This he covered with a thick layer of shock-absorbent foam rubber.

  “I’ll pack more around the sides and over the top when the bomb’s inside,” he explained.

  Taking the four batteries, he wired them up, terminal to terminal, then lashed them into a block with masking tape. Finally he bored four small holes in the lid of the cabinet and wired the block of batteries inside. It was now midday.

  “Right,” he said. “Let’s put the device together. By the way, have you ever seen a nuke?”

  “No,” said Petrofsky hoarsely. He was an expert in unarmed combat, unafraid of fists, knives, or guns. But the cold-blooded joviality of Vassiliev as he handled enough destructive power to flatten a town worried him. Like most people, Petrofsky regarded nuclear science as an occult art.

  “Once they were very complicated,” said the assembler. “Very large, even the low-yield ones, and could be made only under extremely complex laboratory conditions. Today the really sophisticated ones, the multimegaton hydrogen weapons, still are. But the basic atomic bomb today has been simplified to a point where it can be assembled on just about any workbench—given the right parts, of course, and a bit of caution and know-how.”

  “Great,” said Petrofsky. Vassiliev was cutting away the thin lead sheeting around the ball of uranium-235. The lead had been wrapped around cold, like wrapping paper, and its seams sealed with a blowtorch. It came apart quite easily. Inside was the inner ball, five inches in diameter, with a two-inch-wide hole drilled straight through the middle.

  “Want to know how it works?” asked Vassiliev.

  “Sure.”

  “This ball is uranium. Weight, fifteen and a half kilograms. Not enough mass to have reached criticality. Uranium goes critical as its mass increases beyond criticality point.”

  “What do you mean, ‘goes critical’?”

  “It starts to fizz. Not literally, like soda. I mean fizz in radioactive terms. It passes to the threshold of detonation. This ball is not yet at that stage. See that short rod over there?”

  “Yes.”

  It was the uranium rod from the hollow fire extinguisher.

  “That rod will fit exactly into the two-inch hole in the center of this ball. When it does, the whole mass will go critical. The steel tube over there is like a gun barrel, with the uranium rod as the bullet. In detonation the plastic explosive will blast the uranium rod down the tube and into the heart of this ball.”

  “And it goes bang.”

  “Not quite. You need the initiator. Left to itself, the uranium would fizz into extinction, create a hell of a lot of radioactivity, but no explosion. To get the bang you have to bombard the critical uranium with a blizzard of neutrons. Those two disks, the lithium and the polonium, form the initiator. Left apart, they are harmless; the polonium is a mild alpha-emitter, the lithium is inert. Smash them together and they do something odd. They start a reaction; they emit that blizzard of neutrons we need. Subjected to this, the uranium tears itself apart in a gigantic release of energy—the destruction of matter. It takes one hundred millionth of a second. The steel tamper is to hold it all together for that tiny period.”

  “Who drops in the initiator?” asked Petrofsky in an attempt at gallows humor.

  Vassiliev grinned. “No one. The two disks are in there already, but held apart. We put the polonium at one end of the hole in the uranium ball, and the lithium on the nose of the incoming uranium projectile. The bullet comes down the tube, into the heart of the ball, and the lithium on its nose is slammed into the polonium waiting at the other end of the tunnel. That’s it.”

  Vassiliev used a drop of Super Glue to stick the polonium disk to one face of the flat steel plug from Lichka’s shoe heel. Then he screwed the plug into the hole at the base of one of the steel bowls. Taking the uranium ball, he lowered it into the bowl. The interior of that bowl had four nodules, which slotted into four indentations cast
in the uranium. When they met and engaged, the ball was held in place. Vassiliev took a pencil flashlight and peered down the hole through the core of the uranium ball.

  “There it is,” he said, “waiting at the bottom of the hole.”

  Then he placed the second steel bowl over the top, to form a perfect globe, and spent an hour tightening the sixteen bolts around the flange to hold the two halves together.

  “Now, the gun,” he remarked. He pushed the plastic explosive down the eighteen-inch-long steel tube, tamping it firmly but gently with a broom handle from the kitchen until it was packed tightly. Through the small hole in the base of the tube, Petrofsky could make out the plastic explosive bulging up. With the same Super Glue, Vassiliev attached the lithium disk to the flat nose of the uranium rod, wrapped it in a tissue to ensure it could not slip back down the tube from vibration, and rammed the rod down onto the explosive at the bottom. Then he screwed the tube into the globe. It looked like a gray, seven-inch-diameter melon with an eighteen-inch handle sticking out of one end; a sort of oversized stick-grenade.

  “Nearly done,” said Vassiliev. “The rest is conventional bomb-making.”

  He took the detonator, separated the wires from its end and insulated each with tape. If they touched each other, there could be a premature detonation. A length of five-amp electrical wiring was twisted onto each wire from the detonator. Then he pressed the detonator through the hole in the far end of the tube until it was embedded in plastic explosive.

  He lowered the bomb like a baby onto its foam-rubber cradle, packing more foam rubber all around its sides, and yet more over the top, as if it were going to bed. Only the two wires were kept free. One of these was attached to the positive terminal of the battery block. A third wire went from the negative terminal on the batteries, so Vassiliev still had one of each in his hands. He insulated each exposed end.

  “Just in case they touch each other.” He grinned. “Now that would be bad news.”

  The single unused component was the timer box. Vassiliev used the drill to bore five holes in the side of the steel cabinet near the top. The center hole was for the wires out of the back of the timer, which he fed through. The other four were for thin bolts with which he fixed the timer to the exterior of the cabinet. This done, he linked the wires from the batteries and detonator to those from the timer, according to their color coding. Petrofsky held his breath.

  “Don’t worry,” said Vassiliev, who had noticed his apprehension. “This timer was repeatedly tested back home. The cutout, or circuit breaker, is inside, and it works.”

  He stowed the last of the wires, insulated the joins heavily, and lowered the lid of the cabinet, locking it securely and tossing the key to Petrofsky.

  “So, Comrade Ross, there it is. You can wheel it on the dolly and put it in the rear of the hatchback, and it will not be damaged. You can drive where you wish—the vibration will not disturb it. One last thing. The yellow button, here, if pushed firmly, will start the timer, but it will not complete the electrical circuit. The timer will do that two hours later. Press this yellow button and you have two hours to get the hell out. The red button is a manual override. Press that and you get instant detonation.”

  He did not know he was wrong. He really believed what he had been told. Only four men in Moscow knew that both buttons were set for instant detonation. It was now evening.

  “Now, friend Ross, I want to eat, drink a little, sleep well, and go home tomorrow morning. If that is all right with you.”

  “Sure,” said Petrofsky. “Let’s get the cabinet into the corner here, between the sideboard and the drinks table. Help yourself to a whisky, and I’ll rustle up some supper.”

  They set off for Heathrow in Petrofsky’s small car at ten the next morning. At a place southwest of Colchester where the dense woods come close to the road, Petrofsky stopped the car and got out to relieve himself. Seconds later, Vassiliev heard a sharp cry of alarm and ran to investigate. The assembler ended his life with an expertly broken neck behind a screen of trees. The body, stripped of all identification, was laid in a shallow ditch and covered with fresh branches. It would probably be discovered in a day or so, maybe later. Police inquiries would eventually involve a photograph in the local papers, which Petrofsky’s neighbor Armitage might or might not see, and might or might not recognize. It would be too late, anyway. Petrofsky drove back to Ipswich.

  He had no qualms. His orders had been quite clear on the matter of the assembler. How Vassiliev had ever thought he would be allowed to go home, Petrofsky could not imagine. In any case, he had other problems. Everything was ready, but time was short. He had visited Rendlesham Forest and picked his spot; in dense cover but hardly a hundred yards from the perimeter wire of the USAF base at Bentwaters. There would be no one there at four in the morning when he pressed the yellow button to initiate detonation for six o’clock. Fresh branches would cover the cabinet while the minutes ticked away and he drove hard toward London.

  The only thing he did not know was which morning it would be. The signal to go operational would, he knew, come on the Radio Moscow English-language-service news at ten o’clock of the preceding evening. It would be in the form of a deliberate word-fluff by the broadcaster in the first news item. But since Vassiliev could not tell them, Petrofsky still had to inform Moscow that all was in readiness. This meant a last message by radio. After that, the Stephanides brothers would be expendable. In the dusk of a warm June evening he left Cherryhayes Close and drove sedately north toward Thetford and his motorcycle. At nine o’clock, having changed clothes and vehicles, he began to ride northwest into the British Midlands.

  The boredom of an ordinary evening for the watchers in the second-floor-front bedroom of the Royston house was broken at just after ten when Len Stewart came on the air from the police station.

  “John, one of my lads was eating in the kebab place just now. The phone rang twice, then the caller hung up. It rang again twice, and he hung up again. Then he did it a third time. The listeners confirm it.”

  “Did the Greeks try to answer it?”

  “They didn’t reach it in time the first occasion it rang.

  After that, they didn’t try for it. Just went on serving. … Hold on. ... John, are you there?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “My people outside report one of the brothers is leaving. Through the back. He’s going for his car.”

  “Two cars and four men to follow,” ordered Preston. “Remaining two to stay with the restaurant. The runner may be leaving town.”

  But he was not. Andreas Stephanides drove back to Compton Street, parked the car, and let himself in. Lights went on behind the curtains. Nothing else happened. At eleven-twenty, earlier than usual, Spiridon closed the restaurant and walked home, arriving at a quarter to twelve.

  Preston’s tiger came just before the hour of midnight. The street was very quiet. Almost all the lights were out. Preston had scattered his four cars and their crews far and wide, and nobody saw him come. The first they knew, there was a mutter from one of Stewart’s men.

  “There’s a man at the top end of Compton Street, junction of Cross Street.”

  “Doing?” asked Preston.

  “Nothing. Standing motionless in the shadows.”

  “Wait.”

  It was pitch-dark in the Roystons’ upstairs bedroom. The curtains were back, the men standing away from the window. Mungo crouched behind the camera, which was wearing its infrared lens. Preston held his small radio close to one ear. Stewart’s team of six and Burkinshaw’s two drivers with their cars were out there somewhere, all linked by radio. A door opened down the street as someone put a cat out. It closed again.

  “He’s moving,” the radio muttered. “Down toward you. Slowly.”

  “Got him,” hissed Ginger, who was at one of the side windows. “Medium height and build. Dark, long raincoat.”

  “Mungo, can you get him under that streetlight, just before the Greeks’ house?” aske
d Burkinshaw.

  Mungo turned the lens a fraction. “I’m focused on the pool of light,” he said.

  “He’s got ten yards to go,” said Ginger.

  Without a sound the figure in the raincoat entered the glow cast by the streetlamp. Mungo’s camera threw off five fast exposures. The man passed out of the light and arrived at the gate to the Stephanides house. He went up the short path and tapped, instead of ringing, at the door. It opened at once. There was no light in the hall. The dark raincoat passed inside. The door closed.

  In the Roystons’ bedroom the tension broke.

  “Mungo, get that film out of there and over to the police lab. I want it developed and passed straight to Scotland Yard. Immediate transmission to Charles and Sentinel. I’ll tell them to be ready to try to get a make.”

  Something was bothering Preston. Something about the way the man had walked. It was a warm night—why a raincoat? To keep dry? The sun had shone all day. To cover something? Pale clothing, distinctive clothing?

  “Mungo, what was he wearing? You saw him in close-up.”

  Mungo was halfway out the door. “A raincoat,” he said. “Dark. Long.”

  “Under that.”

  Ginger whistled. “Boots. I remember them now. Ten inches of jackboot.”

  “Shit, he’s on a motorcycle,” said Preston. He spoke into the radio. “Everyone out on the streets. On foot only. No car engines. Every street in the district except Compton. We’re looking for a motorcycle with a warm engine block.”

  The problem is, he thought, I don’t know how long he’s going to be in there. Five minutes? Ten? Sixty? He radioed Len Stewart.

  “Len, John here. If we get that motorcycle, I want a bleeper in it somewhere. Meanwhile, call up Superintendent King. He’ll have to mount the operation. When Chummy leaves, we’ll be after him. Harry’s team and me. I want you and your boys to stay on the Greeks. When we are all one hour clear, the police can take the house and the Greeks.”

  Len Stewart, inside the police station, assented and started to phone Superintendent King at home.