The Fourth Protocol (31 page)

Finally, in Karpov’s catalogue, there was the tip that once—just once—Philby had let something slip, something extremely interesting. He wanted to return home. For that, if for nothing else, Karpov did not trust him. Not one inch. He recalled the lined, smiling face across the table from him at Kryuchkov’s dinner party before the New Year. What had he said about Britain then? Something about her political stability’s being overestimated here in Moscow?

There were pieces, and they were beginning to fit together. Karpov decided to check out Mr. Harold Adrian Russell Philby. But he knew that even at his level things were noted: withdrawals from Registry, official requests for information, phone calls, memoranda. His investigation had to be unofficial, personal, and, above all, verbal. The General Secretary was a very dangerous man to antagonize.

John Preston had arrived on his own street and was a hundred yards from the entrance to his apartment house when he heard the hail. He turned to see Barry Banks crossing the street toward him.

“Hello, Barry, small world. What are you doing here?” He knew that the man from K7 lived up north, in the Highgate area. Perhaps he was going to a concert at the nearby Albert Hall.

“Waiting for you, actually,” said Banks with a friendly grin. “Look, a colleague of mine wants to meet you. Would you mind?”

Preston was intrigued but not suspicious. He knew Banks was from Six, But not who might want to meet him. He allowed Banks to guide him across the street and a hundred yards down. Banks stopped at a parked Ford Granada, opened the back door, and gestured to Preston to look inside. He did so.

“Good evening, John. Do you mind if we have a couple of words?”

In surprise Preston climbed in beside the seated figure in the greatcoat. Banks closed the door and wandered away.

“Look, I know it’s an odd way to meet. But there we are. Don’t want to cause any waves, do we? I just felt I had not had a decent opportunity to thank you for the work you did down in South Africa. It was a first-class job. Henry Pienaar was most impressed. So was I.”

“Thank you, Sir Nigel.” Now, what on earth did the wily old fox want? It certainly wasn’t merely to compliment him. But C seemed lost in thought.

“There
is
another matter,” he said at length, as if thinking aloud. “Young Barry tells me it has come to his notice that last Christmas you put in a most interesting report about the Extreme Left in this country. I could well be wrong, but there might have been a foreign dimension to some of the funding going on, if you see what I mean. The thing is, your report was not circulated to us in the Firm. Pity, that.”

“It was NFA’ed,” said Preston quickly.

“Yes, yes, so Barry tells me. Pity, really. I’d have liked to have a glance at it. No chance of getting hold of a copy?”

“It’s in the Registry,” said Preston, puzzled. “It may be NFA’ed, but it’s on file. Barry has only got to withdraw it and send it over in the bag.”

“Actually, no,” said Sir Nigel. “It’s already been withdrawn. By Swanton. And he hasn’t finished with it. Won’t pass it over.”

“But he’s in Finance,” protested Preston.

“Yes,” murmured Sir Nigel regretfully, “and before that it was out to someone in Administration. One might almost think it was being kept out of sight.”

Preston sat there, stunned. Through the windshield he could see Banks dawdling up the street. “There is another copy,” he suggested. “My own. It’s in my office safe.”

Banks drove them. In the evening traffic it was a crawl from Kensington to Gordon Street. An hour later Preston leaned through the window of the Granada and handed his report to Sir Nigel.

General Yevgeni Karpov climbed the last of the stairs to the third floor of the apartment building on
Mira
Prospekt
and rang the buzzer. After several minutes the door opened. Philby’s wife stood in the frame. Karpov could hear the sound of small boys at their tea inside. He had chosen 6:00 p.m. on the hunch that they would be home from school by then.

“Hello, Erita.”

She tilted her head back in a small gesture of defiance. A very protective lady, he thought. Perhaps she knew Karpov was no admirer of her husband.

“Comrade General.”

“Is Kim at home?”

“No. He’s away.”

Not “he’s out,” but “he’s away,” thought Karpov. He affected surprise. “Oh, I had hoped to catch him. Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“No. He’ll be back when he’ll be back.”

“Any idea where I might contact him?”

“No.”

Karpov frowned. Something Philby had said at the Kryuchkov dinner ... about not being allowed to drive since his stroke. Karpov had already checked the basement parking area. Philby’s Volga was there.

“I thought you drove him around these days, Erita.”

She was half smiling. Not the expression of a woman whose husband has walked out on her. More the smile of a woman whose husband has obtained a promotion. “Not anymore. He has a driver.”

“I’m impressed. Well, sorry to have missed him. I’ll try to catch him when he gets back.”

He descended the stairs deep in thought. Retired colonels did not rate personal drivers. Back in his own flat, two blocks behind the Ukraina Hotel, Karpov called the KGB motor pool and insisted on speaking to the chief clerk. When he identified himself, the clerk’s reaction was suitably deferential. Karpov was bluff and jovial. “I’m not in the habit of handing out bouquets of carnations, but I see no reason not to when good work has been done.”

“Thank you, Comrade General.”

“That chauffeur who has been driving for my friend Comrade Colonel Philby. He speaks extremely highly of him. A very fine driver, so he says. If my own man is ever sick, I must ask for him personally.”

“Thank you again, Comrade General. I’ll tell Gregoriev myself.”

Karpov hung up. Gregoriev. Never heard of him. But a quiet talk with the man might be useful.

The next morning, April 8, the
Akademik Komarov
moved quietly past Greenock and into the Clyde, bound upriver for the port of Glasgow. She stopped briefly at Greenock to pick up the pilot and two customs officers. They had the usual glass in the captain’s cabin and ascertained that the ship was out of Leningrad and in ballast to pick up a cargo of heavy-duty pump accessories from Weir of Cathcart Limited. The customs men checked the crew list but did not memorize any particular name. Later it would be established that deckhand
Konstantin Semyonov
was on the list.

The habitual practice when Soviet illegals enter a country by ship is that their names do
not
appear on the crew list. The illegal arrives crouched in a tiny cubbyhole, or oubliette, that has been skillfully cut into the ship’s structure and so well hidden that the most thorough search would not uncover it. Then, if the man for operational or accidental reasons fails to go out on the same ship, there is no discrepancy in the crew list. But this had been a hurried operation. There had been no time for structural changes.

The extra crewman had arrived with the men from Moscow only hours before the
Komarov
was due to leave Leningrad for Glasgow on a long-scheduled freight run, and the captain and his resident political officer had had no choice but to put him on the crew list. His seaman’s paybook was in order, and he would be returning, they were told.

Nevertheless, the man had taken a cabin to himself, spent the whole voyage in it, and the two genuine deckhands whose cabin it was had become fed up with their sleeping bags on the wardroom floor. These bags were cleared away by the time the Scottish pilot came on board. Down in his cabin, tense, for evident reasons, Courier Two was waiting for midnight.

While the Clyde pilot stood on the bridge of the
Komarov
and the fields of Strathclyde slid by as he munched his breakfast sandwiches, it was already noon in Moscow. Karpov called the KGB motor pool again. There was a new chief clerk on duty, as he knew there would be.

“My driver looks as if he’s coming down with the flu,” he said. “He’ll see the day out, but I’m giving him tomorrow off.”

“I’ll ensure that you get a replacement, Comrade General.”

“I’d prefer Gregoriev. Is he available? I’ve heard the best reports of him.”

There was a rustle of paper as the clerk checked his files. “Yes, indeed. He’s been on temporary assignment but he’s back in the pool.”

“Good. Have him report to my Moscow flat at eight tomorrow morning, I’ll have the keys, and the Chaika will be in the basement.”

Stranger and stranger, Karpov thought as he put the phone down. Gregoriev had been ordered to drive Philby around for a while. Why? Because there was a great deal of driving to do, too much for Erita to cope with? Or so that Erita should not know where he was going? And now the man was back in the pool again. Meaning? Probably that Philby was now somewhere else and did not need a driver anymore, at least not until the end of whatever operation he was involved in.

That evening, Karpov told his grateful regular driver he could have the following day off to take his family out.

The same Wednesday evening, Sir Nigel Irvine had a dinner date with a friend in Oxford.

One of the charming things about Saint Antony’s College, Oxford, is that, like so many highly influential British institutions, so far as the general public is concerned it does not exist.

In fact it does exist but is so small and so discreet that if anyone surveying the groves of academe in the British Isles were to blink, he would probably miss it. Its Hall is small, elegant, and tucked away out of sight; it offers no degree courses, educates no students, has no undergraduates and therefore no graduates, and awards no degrees. It has a few resident professors and fellows, who sometimes dine together in Hall but live in rooms scattered around the city, and others who live elsewhere and simply visit. It occasionally invites outsiders to address the fellows—an extraordinary honor—and the professors and fellows occasionally submit papers to the higher echelons of the British establishment, where they are taken very seriously. Its funding is as private as the profile it maintains.

In fact it is a think tank where assembled intellects, often with extensive nonacademic experience, pursue the study of one single discipline: current affairs.

That evening, Sir Nigel dined in Hall with his host, Professor Jeremy Sweeting, and after an excellent repast the professor took the Master back to his rooms in an agreeable house on the outskirts of Oxford for port and coffee.

“Now, Nigel,” said Professor Sweeting when they had broached a vintage Taylor and were at ease before the fire in the study, “what can I do for you?”

“Have you by any chance, Jeremy, heard of a thing called the MBR?”

Professor Sweeting held his port in midair. He stared at it
fiar
a long while. “You know, Nigel, you really do have a way of spoiling a chap’s evening when you have a mind to. Where did you hear those letters?”

For answer, Sir Nigel Irvine passed over the Preston report. Professor Sweeting read it carefully, and it took him an hour. Irvine knew that the professor, unlike John Preston, was no legman. He did not get out on the ground. But he had an encyclopedic knowledge of Marxian theory and practice, of dialectical materialism, and of the teachings of Lenin on the applicability of theory to the practice of the achievement of power. His pursuit and his absorption was to read, study, collate, and analyze.

“Remarkable,” said Sweeting as he handed back the report. “A different approach, a different attitude, of course, and a completely different methodology. But we’ve come up with the same answers.”

“Care to tell me what those answers are?” asked Sir Nigel gently.

“It’s only theory, of course,” apologized Professor Sweeting. “A thousand straws in the wind that may—or may not—make up a bale of hay. Anyway, this is what
I’ve
been on since June 1983. ...”

He talked for two hours, and when, much later, Sir Nigel left to be driven back to London, he was a very pensive man.

* * *

The
Akademik Komarov
was tied up at the Finnieston Quay in the heart of Glasgow, so that the giant crane there could hoist the pumps aboard in the morning. There are no customs or immigration checks there; foreign seamen can simply walk off their ships, across the quay, and into the streets of Glasgow.

At midnight, while Professor Sweeting was still talking, deckhand Semyonov walked down the gangplank, followed the quay for a hundred yards, avoided Betty’s Bar, outside whose door a few drunken sailors were still protesting their right to just one more drink, and turned up Finnieston Street.

He was unremarkable in appearance, being dressed in a turtleneck sweater, corduroy trousers, and an anorak; his shoes were scuffed. Under one arm he clutched a canvas gunnysack held closed by a drawstring. Passing under the Clydeside Expressway, he reached Argyle Street, turned left, and followed it to Partick Cross. He consulted no map but headed on into Hyndland Road. A mile farther on, he reached another major artery, the Great Western Road. He had memorized his route days before.

Here he checked his watch; it told him he still had half an hour. The rendezvous could not be more than ten minutes’ walk ahead. He turned left and proceeded in the direction of the Pond Hotel, next to the boating lake and a hundred yards past the BP service station whose lights he could see blazing in the distance. He was almost at the bus stop at the junction of the Great Western and Hughenden roads when he saw them. They were lounging about in the passenger shelter of the bus stop. It was half past one in the morning, and there were five of them.

In some parts of Britain they call them “skinheads” or “punks,” but in Glasgow they call them “Neds.” Semyonov thought of crossing the street but he was too late. One of them called out to him, and they spilled out of the bus shelter. He could speak some English, but their broad, drink-slurred Glaswegian dialect defeated him. They blocked the sidewalk, so he stepped into the street. One of them grabbed his arm and shouted at him. What the lout actually said was “Wha’ ha’ ya got in ya wee sack, then?”