Frederick Forsyth - The Fourth Protocol

The men, when they came to visit Raoul Levy, were four in number; big, heavy men who arrived in two cars. The first car cruised to a halt outside Levy’s bungalow on the Molenstraat, while the second halted a hundred yards up the street.

The first car disgorged two of the men, who walked briskly but quietly up the short path to the front door. The two drivers waited, lights doused, engines running. It was a bitter night, just after 7:00 p.m., pitch-dark. No one walked the Molenstraat that evening of January 15.

The men who knocked on the front door were brisk and businesslike, men with little time to waste, a job to do, and the opinion that the sooner it was over, the better. They did not introduce themselves when Levy answered the door. They just stepped inside and pulled the door closed behind them. Levy’s protest was hardly out of his mouth when it was cut off by four rigid fingers jabbing into his solar plexus.

The big men pulled Levy’s overcoat around his shoulders, clapped his hat on his head, left the front door unlocked, and walked him expertly down the path to the car, whose rear door opened as they approached. When they drove off with Levy sandwiched between them in the rear seat, only twenty seconds had elapsed.

They took him to the Kesseise Heide, a big public park just northwest of Nijlen, whose fifty acres of heather, grass, oaks, and mixed conifers were completely deserted. Well off the road, in the heart of the heath, the two cars stopped. The driver of the second vehicle, who was to be the interrogator, slipped into the front passenger seat.

He turned toward the rear of the car and nodded to his two colleagues. The man on Levy’s right swept two arms around the small diamond polisher to hold him still, and the gloved hand of one arm went across Levy’s mouth. The other man produced a pair of heavy pliers, took Levy’s left hand, and deftly crushed three knuckles, one after the other.

What frightened Levy even more than the shattering pain was that they did not ask him any questions. They seemed uninterested. When his fourth knuckle pulped in the pliers, Levy was screaming to be asked questions.

The interrogator in the front nodded casually and said, “Want to talk?”

Behind the glove Levy nodded furiously. The glove was removed. Levy let out a long, bubbling scream. When he had finished, the interrogator said, “The diamonds. From London. Where are they?” He spoke Flemish but with a marked foreign accent.

Levy told him without delay. No amount of money could compensate him for the loss of his hands and therefore his livelihood.

The interrogator considered the information soberly. “Keys,” he said.

They were in Levy’s trouser pocket. The interrogator took them and left the car.

Seconds later, his sedan crunched away across the crackling grass toward the road. It was gone for fifty minutes.

During that time Levy whimpered and held his ruined hand. The men on either side of him seemed uninterested in him. The driver sat and stared ahead, gloved hands on the wheel.

When the interrogator rejoined them, he made no mention of the four gems that by now were in his pocket. He said only, “One last question. The man who brought them.”

Levy shook his head. The interrogator sighed at the waste of time and nodded to the man on Levy’s right. The heavy men reversed roles. The one on the right took the pliers and Levy’s right hand. After the crushing of two knuckles on that hand, Levy told them.

The interrogator had a couple of short supplementary questions and then he seemed satisfied. He left the car and went back to his own vehicle. In convoy the two sedans bumped back toward the road. They drove back to Nijlen.

As they went past his house, Levy saw that it was dark. He hoped they would drop him off there, but they did not. They drove through the center of the town and out to the east.

The lights of the cafés, warm and snug against the freezing winter air, went past the car windows, but no one came running out. Levy could even see the blue neon word POLITIE

above the police station across from the church, but no one came out.

Two miles to the east of Nijlen the Looy Straat crosses the rail lines at a point where the Lier-Herentals tracks run straight as an arrow, and the big diesel-electric locomotives go through at more than seventy miles an hour. On either side of the level crossing are farm buildings. Both cars stopped short of the level crossing and doused lights and engines.

Without a word the driver opened the glove compartment, produced a bottle, and handed it back to his two colleagues. One held Levy’s nose closed and the other poured the white grain spirit of a local brand down the gagging throat. When three quarters of it was gone, they stopped and left him alone. Raoul Levy began to drift away in an alcoholic daze. Even the pain eased a bit. The three men in the car, and the one in the sedan ahead of them, waited.

At 11:15 the interrogator came from the first car and muttered something through the window. Levy was unconscious by then but moving fitfully. The men beside him hauled him out of the car and half carried him toward the tracks. At 11:20 one of them hit him hard on the head with an iron bar, and he died. They laid him on the tracks with his shattered hands on one of the rails and his broken head near it.

Hans Grobbelaar has taken the last express of the night out of Lier at 11:09 exactly, as always. It was a routine run and he would be home in his warm bed in Herentals by 1:00 a.m. It was a nonstop freight and he went through Nijlen on time at 11:19. After the crossings there, he piled on the power and went down the straight toward the Looy Straat crossing at close to seventy miles an hour, the spotlight of the big 6268 lighting up the track for a hundred yards ahead.

Just short of the Looy Straat he saw the huddled figure lying on the track and slammed on his brakes. Sheets of sparks flew out from his wheels. The freight train began to slow, but nowhere near enough. Mouth open, be watched through the windshield as the headlight flew toward the crumpled figure. Two men in the yard had had it happen to them before; whether the victims had been suicides or drunks, no one ever knew. Not afterward. With this kind of rig you don’t even feel the thud, they had said. He didn’t.

The screaming locomotive flashed over the spot at thirty miles an hour.

When he finally stopped he could not even look. He ran to one of the farms and raised the alarm. When the police came with lanterns, the mess under his wheels looked like strawberry jam. Hans Grobbelaar did not reach home until dawn.

That same morning, John Preston entered the lobby of the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall, approached the desk, and used his universal pass to identify himself. After the inevitable check call to the man he had come to see, he was escorted into the elevator and down several corridors to the office of the ministry’s head of internal security, a room high at the back of the building and overlooking the Thames.

Brigadier Bertie Capstick had changed little since Preston had last seen him, years before, in Ulster. Big, florid, and genial, with apple cheeks that made him look more like a farmer than a soldier, he came forward with a roar of “Johnny, my boy, as I live and breathe. Come in, come in.”

Although only ten years older than Preston, Bertie Capstick had a habit of calling almost anyone his junior “my boy,” which gave him an avuncular air, matched by his appearance. But he had been a tough soldier once, moving deep into terrorist country during the Malay campaign and later commanding a group of infiltration experts in the jungles of Borneo during what was now called the Indonesian emergency.

Capstick sat Preston down and produced a bottle of single malt from a filing cabinet.