Frederick Forsyth - The Fourth Protocol

Scotland Yard, among the copious facilities of its Forensic Science Department, has a section devoted to voice analysis, which is useful whenever a target criminal, having had his phone tapped, denies it was his voice on the tape. MI5, having no forensic facilities, has to rely on Scotland Yard for this sort of thing, an arrangement usually secured via the Special Branch.

Preston called Detective Sergeant Lander at home, and it was Lander who fixed a priority meeting in Scotland Yard’s voice-analysis section that same afternoon. There was only one technician available, and he was loath to leave his televised football game to come to work, but he did. A thin young man with thick-lensed glasses, he played Preston’s tapes half a dozen times, watching the illuminated line on the oscilloscope screen rise and fall to record the tiniest shades of tone and timbre in the voices.

“Same voice,” he said at last, “no question about it.”

On Sunday, Preston identified the owner of the accented voice by using the Diplomatic List. He also called a friend in the Physics Department of London University, spoiled his day off by asking for a considerable favor, and finally telephoned Sir Bernard Hemmings at his Surrey home.

“I think there is something that we should report to the Paragon Committee, sir,” he said, “tomorrow morning.”

The Paragon Committee met at 11:00 a.m. on Monday, March 2, and Sir Anthony Plumb asked Preston to make his report. There was an air of expectancy, although Sir Bernard Hemmings looked grave.

Preston detailed the events of the first two days following the distribution of the Ascension Island paper as briefly as he could. There was a stir of interest at the news of Berenson’s odd and very brief call from a public phone box on the previous Wednesday evening.

“Did you tape-record that call?” asked Sir Peregrine Jones.

“No, sir, we couldn’t get near enough,” replied Preston.

“Then what do you think it was for?”

“I believe Mr. Berenson was alerting his controller to a pending ‘drop,’ probably using a code to indicate the time and place.”

“Have you any proof of that?” asked Sir Hubert Villiers of the Home Office.

“No, sir.”

Preston went on to describe the visit to the ice-cream parlor, the abandonment of the Daily Telegraph , and the fact that it was cleared away by the proprietor himself.

“Did you manage to recover the paper?” asked Sir Paddy Strickland.

“No, sir. To have raided the ice-cream shop then might have caused the arrest of Mr.

Benotti, and perhaps of Mr. Berenson, but Benotti could have pleaded complete innocence that there was anything inside the newspaper, and Berenson could have pleaded that he had made a terribly careless mistake.”

“But you believe that visit to the ice-cream shop was the drop?” asked Sir Anthony Plumb.

“I’m sure of it,” said Preston. He went on to describe the delivery of one-gallon tubs of ice cream to a dozen customers the next morning, how he had obtained voice samples of eleven of them, and Berenson’s receipt of a wrong-number call that same evening. “The voice that dialed him that evening and established that the caller had obtained a wrong number, apologized, and rang off was the voice of one of the recipients of the ice cream.”

There was silence around the table.

“Could it have been a coincidence?” asked Sir Hubert Villiers doubtfully. “There are an awful lot of perfectly innocent wrong numbers dialed in this city. Get ’em myself, all the time.”

“I checked with a friend yesterday who has access to a computer,” said Preston levelly.

“The chances of a man in a city of twelve million going into an ice-cream parlor for a sundae, of that ice-cream parlor’s delivering to twelve customers the next morning, and of one of those customers speaking through a wrong number to the ice-cream eater by midnight are more than a million to one. The telephone call on Friday evening was an acknowledgment of safe receipt.”

“Let me see if I understand,” said Sir Perry Jones. “Berenson recovered from his colleagues their photocopies of my fictitious paper and pretended to shred them all. In fact, he retained one. He folded it inside his newspaper and left it in the ice-cream shop.

The proprietor collected the paper, plastic-wrapped the classified document, and delivered it next morning to the controller in a tub of ice cream. The controller then alerted Berenson that he had got it.”

“That is what I believe happened,” said Preston.

“Chances of a million to one,” mused Sir Anthony Plumb. “Nigel, what do you think?”

The Chief of the SIS shook his head. “I don’t believe in chances of a million to one,”

he said. “Not in our work—eh, Bernard? No, it was a drop, all right, from the source to the controller via a cutout, Signor Benotti. John Preston has got it right. My congratulations. Berenson’s our man.”

“What has happened since you made this connection, Mr. Preston?” asked Sir Anthony.

“I have switched the surveillance from Berenson to the controller,” said Preston. “I’ve identified him. In fact, this morning I joined the watchers and followed him from his Marylebone flat, where he lives alone as a bachelor, to his office. He is a foreign diplomat. His name is Jan Marais.”

“Jan? Sounds Czech,” said Sir Perry Jones.

“Not quite,” said Preston somberly. “Jan Marais is an accredited diplomat on the staff of the embassy of the Republic of South Africa.”

There was a stunned, disbelieving silence. Sir Paddy Strickland, in language not habitually favored by diplomats, muttered, “Bloody hell.” All eyes turned on Sir Nigel Irvine.

He sat at the end of the table, badly shaken. If it’s true, he thought privately, I’ll have his balls for cocktail olives. He was thinking of General Henry Pienaar, head of South Africa’s National Intelligence Service, successor to the late, unlamented Bureau of State Security. For the South Africans to hire a few London crooks to burgle the archives of the African National Congress was one thing; to run a spy ring inside the British Defense Ministry was, between services, a declaration of war.

“I think, gentlemen, with your indulgence I am going to have to ask for a few days to investigate this matter a little further,” said Sir Nigel.

Two days later, on March 4, one of the senior Cabinet ministers in whom Mrs. Thatcher had confided her desire to go for an early general election was having breakfast with his wife in their handsome town house in Holland Park, London. The wife was browsing through a sheaf of holiday brochures.

“Corfu is nice,” she said, “or Crete.” There was no response, so she pressed her point.

“Darling, we should try to get away for a fortnight of complete rest this summer. It’s been nearly two years, after all. What about June? Before the crush but when the weather is at its best.”

“Not June,” said the minister, without looking up.

“But June’s beautiful,” she protested.

“Not June,” he repeated, “anything but June.”

Her eyes widened. “What’s so important about June?”

“Never mind.”

“You cunning old fox,” she said breathlessly. “It’s Margaret, isn’t it? That cozy little chat at Chequers last Sunday week. She’s going to the country. Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Shush,” said her husband, but after twenty-five years she knew when she had got it right. She looked up to see Emma, their daughter, standing in the doorway.

“Are you off, darling?”

“Yeah,” said the girl, “see you.”

Emma Lockwood was nineteen, a student at art college who subscribed with all her youthful enthusiasm to the cult called “radical politics.” She abominated her father’s political views and sought to protest against them by her own life-style. To her parents’ tolerant exasperation she was never missing from antinuclear demonstrations or the noisier manifestations of left-wing protest. One of her means of personal protest was to sleep with Simon Devine, a lecturer at a polytechnic college whom she had met at a demonstration.