Frederick Forsyth - The Fourth Protocol

Preston started with the shoes, checking for false heels, detachable soles, or cavities in the toecaps. Nothing. The socks took less time, as did the underpants. He had the back off the shattered wristwatch, but it was just a wristwatch. The trousers took longer; he felt all the seams and hems, looking for new stitching or a thickness that could not be accounted for by a double layer of the fabric. Nothing.

The turtleneck sweater the man had been wearing was easy; there were no seams and no hidden papers or hard lumps. He spent much longer on the anorak, but it yielded no fruit, either. By the time he got to the gunny-sack he was more convinced than before that if the mysterious Comrade Semyonov had had something with him, the answer lay here.

He started with the rolled-up sweater that had been in it, more for elimination purposes than anything. It was clean. Then he began on the sack itself. It took half an hour before he was satisfied that the base was just a double-stitched disk of canvas, the sides were of single canvas, and the eyelets at the top were not miniature transmitters or the drawstring a secret aerial.

That left the tobacco tin. It was of Russian origin, an ordinary screw-top tin that still smelled faintly of pungent tobacco. The cotton was cotton, and that left three metal disks: two shiny, like aluminum, and light in weight; the other dull and heavy, like lead. He sat staring at them for a while as they lay on the table; Carmichael looked at him, and the sergeant looked at the floor.

It was not what they were that puzzled him; it was what they were not. They were not anything. The aluminum disks had been above and below the heavy disk; the heavy one was two inches in diameter, and the lighter ones, three inches. He tried to imagine what purpose they could possibly serve, in radio communications, in coding and decoding, in photography. And the answer was—none. They were just metal disks. Still, he was more than ever convinced that a man had died rather than let them fall into the hands of the Neds—who would have thrown them into the gutter, anyway—and rather than let himself be interrogated about them.

Preston rose and suggested lunch. The sergeant, who felt he had wasted a morning, put the productions back into their bags and locked them in a filing cabinet. Then he showed them out.

During lunch at the Pond Hotel—Preston had suggested they drive past the spot of the mugging—he excused himself to make a telephone call. “It may take a while,” he told Carmichael. “Have a brandy on the Sassenachs.”

Carmichael grinned. “I’ll do that, and I’ll toast Bannockburn.”

Out of sight of the dining room, Preston left the hotel and walked over to the BP filling station, where he made several small purchases from the rack of parts in the adjacent shop. Then he went back to the hotel and made his call to London. He gave his assistant, Bright, the Partick police station’s number and told him exactly when he wanted to be called back.

Half an hour later, Preston and Carmichael were back in the police station, where a plainly disgruntled sergeant led them once again to the room where the productions were stored. Preston seated himself behind the table facing the wall phone across the room. In front of him on the table he built up a rampart of clothing from the various bags. At three o’clock the phone rang; the switchboard was putting the London call on the extension.

The sergeant took it.

“It’s for you, sir. London on the line,” he said to Preston.

“Would you mind taking it?” Preston asked Carmichael. “Find out if it’s urgent.”

Carmichael rose and crossed the room to where the sergeant held the phone. For a second both Scottish officers were facing the wall.

Ten minutes later Preston was finished for the last time. Carmichael drove him back to the airport.

“I’ll file a report, of course,” said Preston. “But I can’t see what the hell the Russian was so fussed about. How long will those productions be locked up in Partick?”

“Oh, weeks yet. The Soviet consul’s been told that. The search for the Neds is still on, but it’s a long shot. We might pick up one of them on another charge and get a squeal.

But I doubt it.”

Preston checked in for his flight. Boarding was immediate.

“You know, the stupid thing is,” said Carmichael as he saw him off, “if that Russian had stayed cool, we’d have driven him back to his ship with our apologies, him and his wee toy with him.”

When the plane was airborne, Preston went to the toilet for a bit of privacy and examined the three disks that he had wrapped in his handkerchief. They still meant nothing to him.

The three washers he had obtained from the garage shop and switched for the Russian’s “wee toys” would suffice for a while. In the meantime there was a man he wanted to look at the Russian disks. He worked outside London, and Bright should have asked him to stay on that Friday evening until Preston arrived.

Karpov arrived at General Marchenko’s dacha in darkness, at just after seven. The door was answered by the general’s batman, who showed him into the sitting room.

Marchenko was already on his feet and seemed both surprised and pleased to see his friend from the other, and bigger, intelligence service. “Yevgeni Sergeivitch,” he boomed. “What brings you to my humble cottage?”

Karpov had a shopping bag in his hand. He held it up and delved inside. “One of my boys just got back from Turkey, via Armenia,” he said. “A bright lad, he knows not to come empty-handed. Since there’s nothing to buy in Anatolia, he stopped at Erevan and put these in his suitcase.” He produced one of the four bottles the bag contained, the finest of all the Armenian brandies.

Marchenko’s eyes lit up. “Akhtamar!” he shouted. “Nothing but the best for the FCD.”

“Well,” continued Karpov easily, “I was driving to my own place up the road, and I thought: Who will take a glass of Akhtamar to help me through it? And back came the answer: Old Pyotr Marchenko. So I made a short detour. Shall we see what it tastes like?”

Marchenko roared with laughter. “Sasha! Glasses!” he shouted.

Preston landed just before five o’clock, collected his car from the short-term parking lot, and headed for the M4 motorway. Instead of turning east for London, he took the west lane, toward Berkshire. Thirty minutes brought him to his destination, an institution on the outskirts of the village of Aldermaston.

Known simply as “Aldermaston,” the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment so beloved of peace marchers looking for a target is in fact a multidiscipline unit. Its workers do, indeed, design and build nuclear devices, but it also houses researchers into chemistry, physics, conventional explosives, engineering, pure and applied mathematics, radiobiology, medicine, health and safety standards, and electronics. By the by, it has a very fine metallurgy department.

Years earlier, one of the scientists based at Aldermaston had given a lecture to a group of intelligence officers in Ulster on the kinds of metals the IRA bombmakers favored for their devices. Preston had been one of those in the audience and had remembered the scientist’s name.

Dr. Dafydd Wynne-Evans was waiting for him in the hallway. Preston introduced himself and reminded Dr. Wynne-Evans of his lecture many years before.

“Well, well, what a memory you’ve got,” the scientist said in his lilting Welsh accent.

“All right, Mr. Preston, what can I do for you?”

Preston dug into his pocket, produced the handkerchief, and held it out to show the three disks it contained. “These were taken off somebody in Glasgow,” he said. “They defeat me. I’d like to know what they are and what they could be used for.”