The Fourth Protocol (26 page)

Britain is a very private country. Almost alone in the world, the British do not have to carry any identification on their persons. If one is asked, the production of a letter addressed to oneself will usually do, as if that proved anything. A driver’s license, even though British licenses bear no photograph, is proof positive. A man is expected to be who he says he is.

As he dined that night in Ipswich, Valeri Alexeivitch Petrofsky was perfectly confident, and rightly so, that no one would doubt he was James Duncan Ross. After dinner, he sought from the reception desk the Yellow Pages commercial directory and turned to the section listing real-estate agents.

While Major Petrofsky was dining at the Great White Horse in Ipswich, the doorbell rang at an apartment on the eighth floor of Fontenoy House in Belgravia. It was opened by the owner, George Berenson. For a second he stared in surprise at the figure in the corridor. “Good Lord. Nigel. ...”

They knew each other vaguely, not so much from shared schooldays many years before as from having seen each other occasionally around the Whitehall circuit.

The Chief of the SIS nodded politely but formally. “’Evening, Berenson. Mind if I come in?”

“Of course, of course, by all means. ...”

George Berenson was flustered, though he had no idea of the purpose of the visit. The use by Sir Nigel Irvine of his surname without prefix indicated that the tone of the visit was to be courteous but by no means chatty. There would be no “George” and “Nigel” informality.

“Is Lady Fiona in?”

“No, she’s gone off to one of her committee meetings. We have the place to ourselves.”

Sir Nigel knew that, anyway. He had sat in his car and watched Berenson’s wife leave before making his approach.

Relieved of his coat but retaining his briefcase, Sir Nigel was shown to a chair in the sitting room, not ten feet from the by-now-repaired wall safe behind the mirror. Berenson seated himself opposite.

“Well, now, what can I do for you?”

Sir Nigel opened his case and carefully laid ten photocopies on the glass-topped coffee table. “I think you might, with advantage, have a look at these.”

Berenson silently studied the top copy, lifted it to look at the one underneath, and then the third. At the third sheet he stopped and put them down. He had gone very pale but was still in control of himself. He kept his eyes on the papers. “I don’t suppose there is anything I can say. ...”

“Not much,” said Sir Nigel calmly. “They were returned to us some time ago. We know how you came to lose them—rather bad luck from your point of view. After they were returned, we kept you under surveillance for some weeks, watched the abstraction of the Ascension Island paper, the passing of it to Benotti and thence to
Marais.
It’s pretty well tied up, you know.”

A little of what he said was provable, but most was pure bluff; he had no wish to let Berenson know just how weak the legal case against him was. The Deputy Chief of Defense Procurement straightened his back and raised his eyes. Now comes the defiance, thought Irvine, the attempt at self-justification. Funny how they all run to pattern. Berenson met his gaze. The defiance was there.

“Well, since you know it all, what are you going to do?”

“Ask a few questions,” replied Sir Nigel. “For example, how long has it been going on, and why did you start?”

Despite his effort at self-control and defiance, Berenson was still confused enough not to have wondered at one very simple point: it was not the duty of the Chief of the SIS to have this sort of confrontation. Spies for foreign powers were picked up by counterintelligence. But his desire to justify himself overcame his capacity for analysis.

“As to the first, just over two years.”

Could be worse, thought Sir Nigel. He knew
Marais
had been in Britain for almost three years, but Berenson might have been run by another South African pro-Soviet “sleeper” even before that. Apparently not.

“As to the second, I would have thought it was obvious.”

“Let’s assume I’m a bit slow,” suggested Sir Nigel. “Enlighten me. Why?”

Berenson drew a deep breath. Perhaps, like so many before him, he had prepared his defense inside his own head often enough, arguing before the courtroom of his own conscience—or what passed for it.

“I take the view, and have done for years, that the only struggle on this planet worth a light is the one against Communism and Soviet imperialism,” he began.

“In that struggle, South Africa forms one of the bastions. Probably the principal bastion, if not the only one, south of the Sahara. For a long time I have thought it futile and self-defeating for the Western powers, on dubious moral grounds, to treat South Africa as if she were a leper, to deprive her of any share in our joint planning to respond to the Soviet threat on a global scale.

“I have believed for years that South Africa has been shabbily treated by the Western powers, that it was both wrong and stupid to exclude her from access to NATO’s contingency planning.”

Sir Nigel nodded, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “And you thought it right and proper to redress the balance?”

“Yes, I did. And, the Official Secrets Act notwithstanding, I still do.”

The vanity, thought Sir Nigel, always the vanity, the monumental self-esteem of inadequate men. Nunn May, Pontecorvo,
Fuchs,
Prime—the thread ran through them all: the self-arrogated right to play God, the conviction that the traitor alone is right and all his colleagues fools, coupled with the druglike love of power derived from what he sees as the manipulation of policy, through the transfer of secrets, to the ends in which he believes and to the confusion of his supposed opponents in his own government, those who have passed him over for promotion or honors.

“Mmmm. Tell me, did you begin at your own suggestion, or at Marais’s?”

Berenson thought for a while. “Jan
Marais
is a diplomat, so he is beyond your power,” he said. “There’s no harm in my answering. It was at his suggestion. We never met when I was stationed in Pretoria. We met here, just after he had arrived. We found we had a lot in common. He persuaded me that if a time of conflict with the USSR ever came, South Africa would have to stand alone in the Southern Hemisphere, astride the vital routes from the Indian Ocean to the South Atlantic, and probably with Soviet bases strung throughout black Africa. It seemed to us both that without some indication of how NATO would operate in these two spheres, South Africa would be hamstrung, even though she was our staunchest ally in those parts.”

“Powerful argument.” Sir Nigel nodded regretfully. “You know, when we traced
Marais as
your controller, I took a risk and put the name straight to General Pienaar. He denied
Marais
had ever worked for him.”

“Well, he would.”

“Yes, he would. But we sent a man down there to check out Pienaar’s claim. Perhaps you ought to look at this.” He produced from his briefcase the report Preston had written on his return from Pretoria, with the photograph of the boy
Marais
clipped to the top.

With a shrug Berenson began to read the seven foolscap pages. At one point he sucked in his breath sharply, pushed his knuckles into his mouth, and gnawed at one. When he had turned the last page, he put both open hands up to cover his face and rocked slowly back and forth. “Oh, my God,” he breathed, “what have I done?”

“A hell of a lot of damage, actually,” said Sir Nigel. He let Berenson absorb the full measure of his misery without interruption. He sat back and gazed without pity at the destroyed mandarin. For Sir Nigel, Berenson was just another grubby little traitor who could take a solemn oath to his Queen and country, and for his own conceit betray them all. A man of the same degree, if not the scale, of Donald Maclean.

Berenson was no longer pale, he was ashen gray. When he took his hands from his face, he had aged by many years. “Is there anything, anything at all, that I can do?”

Sir Nigel shrugged as if there was little enough that anyone could do. He decided to turn the knife a few more twists. “There’s a faction, of course, who want you and
Marais
arrested immediately. Pretoria has waived his immunity. You’d get a middle-class, middle-aged jury—the crown counsel would see to that. Honest people, but not devious. They’d probably never believe in the false-flag recruitment at all. We’re talking about life—and at your age that would mean
life
—in Parkhurst or Dartmoor.”

He let that sink in for several minutes, then continued: “As it happens, I’ve managed to keep the hard-line faction at bay for a while. There is another way. ...”

“Sir Nigel, I will do anything, I mean it. Anything.”

How true, thought the Chief, how very true. If only you knew. “Three things, actually,” he said out loud. “One: You continue going to the ministry as if nothing had happened, maintain the usual facade, the usual routines, let not a ripple disturb the surface of the water.

“Two: Here in this apartment, after dark and if necessary through the night, you help us with the damage assessment. The only possible way to mitigate the harm already done is for us to know everything, every single thing, that went to Moscow. You withhold one dot or comma, and it’ll be porridge and mailbags until you croak.”

“Yes, yes, of course. That I can do. I recall every single document that was passed. Everything. ...
Er,
you said three things.”

“Yes,” said Sir Nigel, studying his fingernails. “The third is tricky. You maintain relations with
Marais
—”

“I ... what?”

“You don’t have to see him. I’d prefer you didn’t. I don’t think you’re enough of an actor to keep up the pretense in his presence. Just the usual contact through coded phone calls when you want to make a delivery.”

Berenson was genuinely bewildered. “A delivery of what?”

“Material that my people, in collaboration with others, will prepare for you. Disinformation, if you like. Apart from your work with the Defense people on damage assessment, I want you to collaborate with me. Do some real damage to the Soviets.”

Berenson grasped, as a drowning man at a straw. Five minutes later, Sir Nigel rose. The damage-assessment people would be around after the weekend. He let himself out. As he walked down the corridor to the elevator, he was quietly satisfied. He thought of the broken and terrified man he had left behind. “From now on, you bastard, you work for me,” he muttered.

The young girl in the front office at Oxborrows looked up as the stranger entered. She took in his appearance with appreciation. Medium height, compact and fit-looking, with a ready smile, nut-brown hair, and hazel eyes. She liked the hazel eyes.

“Can I help you?”

“I hope so. I’m new to the district, but I’ve been told you have houses for rent.”

“Oh, yes. You’ll want to speak to Mr. Knights. He handles the rentals. What name shall I say?”

He smiled again. “Ross,” he said, “James Ross.”

She depressed a switch and spoke into the intercom. “There’s a Mr. Ross in the office, Mr. Knights. About a house. Can you see him?”

Two minutes later, James Ross was seated in the office of Mr. Knights. “I’ve just moved up from Dorset to take over East Anglia for my company,” he began easily. “Ideally I’d like my wife and kids to come up and join me as soon as possible.”

“Perhaps you’re looking to buy a house, then?”

“Not just yet. For one thing, one wants to look around for the right house. Then, the details tend to take a bit of time. Second, I may only be here for a limited period. Depends on the head office. You know.”

“Of course, of course.” Mr. Knights understood completely. “A short lease on a house would help you to get settled while waiting to see if you would be staying longer?”

“Exactly,” said Ross. “In a nutshell.”

“Furnished or unfurnished?”

“Furnished, if you have such a thing.”

“Quite right,” said Mr. Knights, reaching for a selection of folders. “Unfurnished houses are almost impossible to come by. You can’t always get the people out at the end of the lease. Now, we’ve got four that might suit you on the books at the moment.”

He offered Mr. Ross the brochures. Two were evidently too large to be plausible for a commercial representative and needed a lot of upkeep. The other two were possibles. Mr. Knights had an hour and drove his client to see both. One was perfect, a small, neat brick house on a small, neat brick road in a small, neat brick housing development off the Belstead Road.

“It belongs to a Mr. Johnson,” said Mr. Knights as they came downstairs, “an engineer working on contract in Saudi Arabia for a year. But there’s only a six-month lease left to run.”

“That should do very well,” said Mr. Ross.

The address was 12 Cherryhayes Close. All the surrounding streets had names ending in “hayes,” so that the whole complex was known simply as “The Hayes.” Brackenhayes, Gorsehayes, Almondhayes, and Heatherhayes were all around. Number 12 Cherryhayes was separated from the sidewalk by a six-foot strip of grass and there was no fence. A garage was attached to one side—Petrofsky knew he would need a garage. The back garden was small and fenced, reached through a door from the tiny kitchen. The downstairs contained the glass-paneled front door, which led into a narrow hall. Straight in line with the front door was the staircase to the upper landing. Under the stairs was a broom closet.

For the rest there was the single sitting room at the front and the kitchen down the hall between the stairs and the sitting-room door. Upstairs were two bedrooms, one front and one back, and the bathroom. The house was inconspicuous and blended with all the other identical brick boxes down the street, themselves occupied mostly by young couples, he in commerce or industry, she coping with the house and one or two toddlers. The place a man waiting for his wife and children to join him from Dorset at the end of the school term would choose and not be noticed very much.

“I’ll take it,” he said.

“If we can just go back to the office and sort out the details ...” said Mr. Knights.