The Fourth Protocol (4 page)

The room was oblong, about twenty-five by eighteen feet, richly carpeted and furnished. Ahead of him were the double-glazed picture windows facing south and over the street. To his right was a wall containing a stone fireplace and, in one corner, a door that presumably led to the master bedroom suite. To his left the opposite wall contained two doors: one open to a hallway going to the guest bedrooms; the other closed, perhaps to the dining room and kitchen.

He spent another ten minutes standing motionless, scanning the walls and ceiling. His reason was simple: there could well be a static movement alarm that Billy Rice had not seen and that would detect any body heat or movement entering the room. If bells went off, he could be out of there in three seconds. There were no bells; the system was based on a wired-up door and, probably, windows, which he did not intend to touch anyway, and on a system of pressure pads on the floor.

The safe, he was sure, would be in this room or in the master bedroom, and it would be on an outside wall, since interior walls would not be thick enough. Just before eleven o’clock he spotted it. Right in front of him, in an eight-foot piece of wall between the two wide windows, was a gilt-framed mirror; it did not hang slightly away from the wall like the pictures, which cast narrow shadows at their edges, but was flat against the wall, as if hinged.

Using his pliers to lift the edge of the carpet, he worked his way around the walls, unveiling the threadlike wires leading from the baseboards to the pads, somewhere out toward the center of the room.

When he reached the mirror he saw there was one pressure pad directly beneath it. He thought of moving it, but instead lifted a large, low coffee table from nearby and placed it over the pad, its legs clear of the edges. He now knew that if he stayed close to the walls, or stood on pieces of furniture (no furniture can stand on a pressure pad), he would be safe.

The mirror was kept close to the wall by a magnetic catch, also wired. That was no problem. He slipped a flat wafer of magnetized steel between the two magnets of the catch, one in the mirror frame and the other in the wall. Keeping his substitute flat to the wall-based magnet, he eased the mirror away from the wall. The wall magnet made no protest; it was still touching another magnet, so it did not report that the contact had been broken.

Rawlings smiled. The wall safe was a nice little Hamber Model D. He knew the door was made of half-inch-thick high-tensile hardened steel; the hinge was a vertical rod of hardened steel, going into the frame upward and downward from the door itself. The securing mechanism consisted of three hardened-steel bolts emerging from the door and entering the frame to a depth of one and a half inches. Behind the steel face of the door was a two-inch-deep tinplate box containing the three locking bolts, the vertical control bolt that governed their movements, and the three-wheel combination lock whose face was now staring at him.

Rawlings did not intend to tamper with any of this. There was an easier way—to cut the door from top to bottom on the hinge side of the combination dial. That would leave sixty percent of the door, containing the combination lock and three locking bolts, jammed into the safe’s doorframe. The other forty percent of the door would swing open, giving him enough space to get his hand inside and the contents out.

He worked his way back to the hall, where he had left his bottle of champagne, and returned with it. Squatting on the coffee table, he unscrewed the bottom of the false bottle and emptied out his supplies. Apart from an electric detonator, ensconced in cotton in a small box, a collection of small magnets, and a reel of ordinary household electric cord, he had brought a length of CLC.

Rawlings knew the best way to cut half-inch steel plate was to use the Monroe theory, named after the inventor of the shaped-charge principle. What he was holding was called in the trade CLC, or charge-linear-cutting—a V-shaped length of metal, stiff but just pliable, encased in plastic explosive, manufactured by three companies in Britain, one government-owned and the other two in the private sector. CLC was definitely not available except under stringent license, but as a professional cracksman Rawlings had a contact, a “bent” employee in one of the private-sector companies.

Quickly and expertly. Rawlings prepared the length he needed and applied it to the outside of the Hamber’s door, from top to bottom, on just one side of the combination dial. Into one end of the CLC he inserted the detonator, from which protruded two twisted copper wires. These he untwisted and separated widely, to prevent a short circuit later. To each wire he attached one of the strands from his domestic electric cord, which itself terminated in a three-pin household plug.

Unraveling the cord carefully, he worked his way backward around the room and into the corridor leading to the guest bedrooms. The lee of the hallway would give him protection from the blast. Making his way gingerly to the kitchen, he filled with water a large polyethylene bag he took from his pocket. This he fixed to the wall with thumbtacks to hang over the explosive on the safe’s door. Feather cushions, Uncle Albert had told him, are for the birds and TV. There is no shock absorber like water.

It was twenty to midnight. The party upstairs was getting noisier and noisier. Even in this luxury building, with its accent on privacy, he could clearly hear the shouting and dancing. His last act before retiring to the corridor was to turn on the television set. Inside the corridor he located a wall plug, made sure the switch was off, and plugged in his electric cord. Then he waited.

By one minute to midnight the noise above was horrendous. Then, suddenly, it lessened as somebody roared for silence. In the quiet, Rawlings could hear the television he had switched on in the sitting room. The traditional Scottish program, with its ballads and Highland dancing, changed to a static image of Big Ben atop London’s Houses of Parliament. Behind the clock’s facade was the giant bell, Great Tom, which was often mistakenly called Big Ben. The TV commentator chattered away the seconds to midnight as people across the kingdom filled their glasses. The quarters began to sound.

After the quarters there was a pause. Then Great Tom spoke:
Bong!
the thunderous boom of the first stroke of midnight. It echoed in twenty million homes across the land; it crashed through the apartment on the ninth floor of Fontenoy House and was itself eclipsed by the roar of cheering and “Auld Lang Syne.” As the first boom rang out on the eighth floor, Jim Rawlings flicked the electric switch to On.

The flat crack went unnoticed, save by himself. He waited sixty seconds, then unplugged his cord and began to work his way back to the safe, tidying up his gear as he went. The plumes of smoke were clearing. Of the plastic cushion and its gallon of water there was nothing left but a few damp patches. The door of the safe looked as if it had been cleft from top to bottom by a blunt ax wielded by a giant. Rawlings blew away a few wisps of smoke and with gloved hand pulled the smaller part of the door back on its hinges. The tinplate box had been torn to pieces by the blast, but all the bolts in the other section of the door were in their sockets. The opening he had made was large enough for him to peer inside. A cash box and a velvet bag; he eased out the bag, undid the drawstring, and emptied the contents onto the coffee table.

They glittered and flared in the light, as if they contained their own fire. The Glen Diamonds. Rawlings had put the remainder of his equipment—the cord, the empty detonator box, the thumbtacks, and the remainder of the CLC—back into the false champagne bottle before he realized he had an unforeseen problem. The pendant and earrings would slip into his trouser pockets, but the tiara was wider and higher than he had thought. He glanced around for a receptacle that would attract no attention. It was lying on top of a bureau a few feet away.

He emptied the contents of the
attaché
case—wallet, credit cards, pens, an address book, and a couple of folders—into the seat of an armchair.

The
attaché
case was exactly right. It accommodated the Glen Suite and the champagne bottle, which might have seemed odd if glimpsed
leaving
a party. With a last glance around the sitting room, Rawlings switched off the light, stepped back into the hall, and closed the door. Once in the corridor, he relocked the main door and sixty seconds later strolled past the porter’s lodge and out into the night. The old man did not even look up.

It was nearly midnight that first day of January 1987 when Harold Philby sat down at the sitting-room table in his Moscow flat. He had had his bender the previous evening at the Blakes’ party, but had not even enjoyed it. His thoughts were too locked into what he would have to write. During the morning he had recovered from the inevitable hangover and now, with
Erita
and the boys asleep in bed, he had the peace and quiet to try to think things out.

There was a
coo
from across the room; Philby rose and went over to the large cage in the corner and gazed through the bars at a pigeon with one leg in splints. Philby had always adored pets, from his vixen in Beirut through a range of canaries and parakeets in this very apartment. The pigeon waddled across the floor of its cage, the splinted leg impeding its passage.

“All right, old fellow,” said Philby through the bars, “we’ll have them off soon and you will be able to fly again.”

He returned to the table. It had better be good, he told himself for the hundredth time. The General Secretary was a bad man to cross and a hard one to deceive. Some of those senior Air Force men who had made such a dog’s breakfast of the tracking and downing of the Korean jetliner back in 1983 had on his personal recommendation ended up in cold graves beneath the permafrost of the Kamchatka. Racked by ill health, confined to a wheelchair part of the time he might be, but the General Secretary was still the undisputed master of the USSR. His word was law, his brain was still razor-sharp, and his pale eyes missed nothing. Taking paper and pencil, Philby began to rough out the first draft of his reply.

At just before midnight of January 1, the owner of the apartment in Fontenoy House returned alone to London. A tall, graying, distinguished man in his mid-fifties, he drove straight into the basement parking area, using his own plastic admission card, and, carrying his suitcase, rode up in the elevator to the eighth floor. He was in a foul mood. He had driven for six hours, having left his brother-in-law’s stately home three days prematurely, following a blazing row with his wife. She, angular and horsey, adored the countryside as much as he loathed it. Content to stride the bleak Yorkshire moors in midwinter, she had left him miserably cooped up indoors with her brother, the tenth Duke. Which was in a way worse, for the apartment owner, who prided himself on his appreciation of the manly virtues, was convinced the wretched fellow was gay.

The New Year’s Eve dinner had been appalling for him, surrounded as he was by his wife’s cronies, who talked hunting, shooting, and fishing the entire time, the whole being punctuated by the high, twittering laugh of the Duke and his too-handsome pals. That morning he had made some remark to his wife and she had gone off the deep end. The result was that it had been agreed he would drive south alone after tea; she would remain as long as she wished, which might be a month.

He entered the hall of his apartment and paused; the alarm system should be emitting a loud, repeated
peep
that should last for thirty seconds before the full alarm sounded, during which time he could reach the master control box and turn it off. Damn thing, he thought, probably out of order. He went into the coat closet and turned the whole system off with his personal key. Then he entered the sitting room and threw on the light.

He stood, with his bag behind him in the hall, and stared at the scene in openmouthed horror. The damp patches had evaporated in the warmth, and the television was not on. What caught his eye at once was the scorched wall and cloven safe door right ahead of him. He crossed the room in several strides and peered into the safe. There was no doubt—the diamonds were gone. He looked around again, saw his possessions scattered in the armchair by the fireplace and the carpet lifted from its smooth edge against the wall. He sank into the other fireside armchair, as white as a sheet.

“Oh, my God,” he breathed. He seemed stunned by the nature of the disaster and remained in the chair for ten minutes, breathing heavily and staring at the disarray.

Finally he rose and went to the telephone. With a trembling forefinger he dialed a number. At the other end it rang and rang, but there was no reply.

The following morning, at just before eleven, John Preston walked down Curzon Street toward the headquarters of the department he worked for, around the corner from the
Mirabelle
restaurant, in which few of the department’s employees could afford to dine.

Most of the civil service that Friday morning was being allowed to bridge over from Thursday, New Year’s Day, which was a public holiday anyway, into the weekend. But Brian Harcourt-Smith had asked Preston to come in especially, so he had come. He suspected he knew what the Deputy Director-General of MI5 wanted to talk about.

For three years, more than half the time he had spent with MI5 since joining as a late entrant in the summer of 1981, John Preston had been in
F
Branch of the service, which dealt with surveillance of extremist political organizations of the Left and the Right; with research into these bodies, and with the running of agents within them. For two of those years he had been in F1, heading up
D
Section, which was concerned with the penetration of extreme left-wing elements into Britain’s Labour Party. His report, the result of his investigations, had been submitted two weeks earlier, just before Christmas. He was surprised it had been read and digested so quickly.

He presented himself at the front desk, proffered his card, was vetted, checked out with the DDG’s office as an expected visitor, and allowed to proceed to the top of the building.