Frederick Forsyth: The Fourth Protocol

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.