Frederick Forsyth - The Fourth Protocol

Preston had spent half an hour on the phone to London. First he raised the duty officer at Sentinel, who put him through to Banks. “Barry, I want you to contact C wherever he is and ask him to call me back.”

Sir Nigel Irvine came on the line five minutes later, as calm and lucid as if he had not been asleep at all. Preston informed him of the night’s events.

“Sir, there was a reception party at Sheffield. Two Special Branch and three uniformed, authorized to make an arrest.”

“I don’t think that was part of the arrangement, John.”

“Not as far as I was concerned.”

“All right, John, I’ll handle it at this end. You’ve got the house. Are you going to move in now?”

“I’ve got a house,” corrected Preston. “I don’t want to move in because I don’t think it’s the end of the trail. One other thing, sir. If Winkler leaves and heads for home, I want him to be allowed to go in peace. If he is a courier, or message carrier, or just checking up, his people will be expecting him back in Vienna. If he fails to show, they’ll switch off the cutouts from top to bottom.”

“Yes,” said Sir Nigel carefully. “I’ll have a word with Sir Bernard about that. Do you want to stay with the operation up there or come back to London?”

“I’d like to stay up here, if possible.”

“All right. I’ll make it a top-level request from Six that what you want is accorded to you. Now, cover yourself and make your operational report to Charles Street.”

When he put the phone down, Sir Nigel called Sir Bernard Hemmings at his home. The Director-General of Five agreed to meet him for breakfast at the Guards Club at eight.

“So you see, Bernard, it really may be that the Center is mounting quite a large operation inside this country at the moment,” said C as he buttered his second piece of toast.

Sir Bernard Hemmings was deeply disturbed. He sat with his food untouched in front of him. “Brian should have told me about the Glasgow incident,” he said. “What the hell’s that report still sitting on his desk for?”

“We all make errors of judgment from time to time. Errare humanum est , and all that,”

murmured Sir Nigel. “After all, my Vienna people thought Winkler was a bagman for a longstanding ring of agents, and I deduced Jan Marais might be one of that ring. Now it appears there could be two separate operations, after all.”

He refrained from admitting that he himself had written the Vienna cable of the previous day in order to obtain what he wanted from his colleague—Preston’s inclusion as field controller in the Winkler operation. For C there was a time for candor and a time for discreet silence.

“And the second operation, the one linked to the intercept in Glasgow?” asked Sir Bernard.

Sir Nigel shrugged. “I just don’t know, Bernard. We’re all feeling our way in the dark.

Brian evidently does not believe it. He may be right. In which case I’m the one with egg all over his face. And yet, the Glasgow affair, the mysterious transmitter in the Midlands, the arrival of Winkler.. . That man Winkler was a lucky break, maybe the last we’ll get.”

“Then what are your conclusions, Nigel?”

C smiled apologetically. It was the question he had been waiting for. “No conclusions, Bernard. A few tentative deductions. If Winkler is a courier, I’d expect him to make his contact and hand over his package, or to pick up the package he came to collect, at some public place. A parking lot, river embankment, garden bench, seat by a pond ... If there is a big operation going down here, there must be a top-level illegal in on the ground. The man running the show. If you were he, would you want the couriers turning up at your doorstep? Of course not. You’d have one cutout, maybe two. Do have some coffee.”

“All right, agreed.” Sir Bernard waited as his colleague poured him a cup.

“Therefore, Bernard, it occurs to me that Winkler cannot be the big fish. He’s small potatoes—a bagman, a courier, or something else. Same goes for the two Cypriots in a small house in Chesterfield. Sleepers, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes,” agreed Sir Bernard, “low-level sleepers.”

“It begins to look, therefore, as if the Chesterfield house might be a depository for incoming packages, a mail drop, a safe house, or maybe the home of the transmitter.

After all, it’s in the right area; the two squirts intercepted by GCHQ were from the Derbyshire Peak District and the hills north of Sheffield, an easy drive from Chesterfield.”

“And Winkler?“

“What can one think, Bernard? A technician sent in to repair the transmitter if it develops problems? A supervisor to check on progress? Either way, I think we should let him report back that everything is in order.”

“And the big fish—do you think he might show up?”

Sir Nigel shrugged again. His own fear was that Brian Harcourt-Smith, balked of his intended arrest at Sheffield, would try to engineer the storming of the Chesterfield house.

For Sir Nigel, this would be wholly premature. “I should have thought there has to be a contact there somewhere. Either he comes to the Greeks or they go to him,” he said.

“You know, Nigel, I think we should stake out that house in Chesterfield, at least for a while.”

The Chief of the SIS looked grave. “Bernard, old friend, I happen to agree with you.

But young Brian seems very gung-ho to move in and make a few arrests. He tried last night at Sheffield. Of course, arrests look good for a while, but—”

“You leave Harcourt-Smith to me, Nigel,” said Sir Bernard grimly. “I may be pegging out, but there’s a bark left in the old dog yet. You know, I’m going to take over the direction of this operation personally.”

Sir Nigel leaned forward and placed his hand on Sir Bernard’s forearm. “I really wish you would, Bernard.”

Winkler left the house on Compton Street at half past nine, on foot. Mungo and Barney slipped out of the rear of the Royston house, through the garden, and picked up the Czech on the corner of Ashgate Road. Winkler went back to the station, took the London train, and was picked up at St. Paneras by a fresh team. Mungo and Barney went back to Derbyshire.

Winkler never returned to his boardinghouse. Whatever he had left there he abandoned, as he had the suitcase with pajamas and shirt on the train, and went straight to Heathrow.

He caught the afternoon flight to Vienna. Irvine’s head of station there later reported that Winkler was met on his arrival in Austria by two men from the Soviet Embassy.

Preston spent the rest of the day closeted in the police station attending to the wealth of administrative detail involved in a stakeout in the provinces. The bureaucratic machinery ground into action; Charles Street jacked up the Home Office, which authorized the chief constable of Derbyshire to instruct Superintendent King to afford Preston and his men every cooperation. King was happy to do so, anyway, but the paperwork had to be in order.

Len Stewart came up by car with a second team, and they were billeted in police bachelor quarters. Photos were taken with a long lens of the Stephanides brothers as they left Compton Street for their restaurant at Holywell Cross just before noon, and dispatched by motorcycle to London. Other experts came in from Manchester, went into the local telephone exchange, and put a tap on both their phones, at the house and at the restaurant. A direction-finder bleeper was slipped into their car.

By late afternoon London had a make on them. They were not true Cypriots, but they were brothers. Veteran Greek Communists, once active in the ELLAS movement, they had left mainland Greece for Cyprus twenty years earlier. Athens had therefore kindly informed London. Their real name was Costapopoulos. According to Nicosia, they had vanished from Cyprus eight years earlier.