The Fourth Protocol (35 page)

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.”

The doctor looked at them closely. “Nefarious purposes, you think?”

“Could be.”

“Difficult to say without tests,” said the metallurgist. “Look, I’ve got a dinner tonight and my daughter’s wedding tomorrow. Can I run them through some tests on Monday and call you?”

“Monday will do fine,” said Preston. “I’m taking a few days off, actually. I’ll be at home. Can I give you my number in Kensington?”

Dr. Wynne-Evans hurried upstairs, locked the disks in his safe for the night, bade good-bye to Preston, and hurried to his dinner. Preston drove back to London.

While Preston was on the road, the listening station at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire picked up a single squirt from a clandestine transmitter. Menwith got it first, but Brawdy in Wales and Chicksands in Bedfordshire also got a trace and computed the crossbearings. The source was somewhere in the hills north of Sheffield.

When the Sheffield police got there, the spot turned out to be the shoulder of a lonely road between Barnsley and Pontefract. There was no one there.

Later that evening, one of the duty officers at GCHQ Cheltenham accepted a drink in the office of the duty director.

“It’s the same bugger,” the officer said. “He’s carborne and he’s got a good set. He only spent five seconds on the air, and it looks indecipherable. First the Derbyshire Peak District, now the Yorkshire hills. It looks as if he’s somewhere in the north Midlands.”

“Keep after him,” said the director. “We haven’t had a sleeper transmitter go suddenly active in ages. I wonder what he’s saying.”

What Major Valeri Petrofsky had been saying, although transmitted by his operator when he was long gone, was:
Courier Two never showed. Inform soonest re arrival substitute
.

The first bottle of Akhtamar stood empty on the table, and the second was well broached. Marchenko was flushed, but he could be a two-bottle-a-day man when the mood took him, so he was still well in control.

Karpov, though he seldom drank for pleasure, and even more rarely drank alone, had seasoned his stomach for years on the diplomatic circuit. He had a good head when he needed it. Apart from that, he had forced half a pound of white butter down his throat before leaving Yasyenevo, and though he had nearly gagged on it, the fat had lined his stomach and was now retarding the onset of the alcohol’s effect.

“What are you up to these days, Petya?” he asked, dropping into the diminutive and familiar form of the name.

Marchenko’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”

“Come on, Petya, we go back a long way. Remember when I saved your ass in Afghanistan three years back? You owe me a favor. What’s going on?”

Marchenko remembered. He nodded solemnly. In 1984 he had been heading a big GRU operation against the Muslim rebels up near the Khyber Pass. There was one particularly outstanding guerrilla leader who ran raids into Afghanistan, using as his bases the refugee camps inside Pakistan. Marchenko had rashly sent a snatch-squad over the border to get him. They had run into bad trouble. The pro-Soviet Afghans had been unmasked by the Pathans and had died horribly. The single Russian accompanying them was lucky to survive; the Pathans had handed him to the Pakistani authorities of the North-West Frontier District, hoping for some arms in exchange.

Marchenko had been out on a limb. He had appealed to Karpov, then head of the Illegals Directorate, and Karpov had endangered one of his best undercover Pakistani officers in Islamabad to get the Russian sprung and back over the border. A big international incident then could have broken Marchenko, and he would have joined the long list of Soviet officers whose careers had crashed in that miserable country.

“Yes, all right, I know I owe you, Zhenia, but don’t ask what I’ve been on for the past few weeks. Special assignment, very close to the chest. Top secret—know what I mean?” He tapped the side of his nose with a sausagelike forefinger and nodded solemnly.

Karpov leaned forward and refilled the GRU general’s glass from the third bottle. “Sure, I know, sorry I asked,” he said reassuringly. “Won’t mention it again. Won’t mention the operation again.”

Marchenko waved an admonitory finger. His eyes were bloodshot. He reminded Karpov of a wounded boar in a thicket, his brain dimmed by alcohol instead of pain and blood loss, but dangerous nevertheless. “Not operation ... no operation ... canceled. Sworn to secrecy ... all of us. Very high up ... higher than you could imagine. Don’t mention it again, okay?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, “ said Karpov, filling the glasses again. He was taking advantage of Marchenko’s drunkenness to put more brandy in the GRU man’s glass than in his own, but he was still finding it difficult to focus.

Two hours later, the last of the Akhtamar was a third gone. Marchenko was slumped, chin on chest. Karpov raised his glass in yet another of the endless toasts. “Here’s to oblivion.”

“Oblivion?” Marchenko shook his head in bewilderment. “I’m all right. Drink you FCD bastards under the table anytime. Not oblivious ...”

“No,” corrected Karpov. “Oblivion of the plan. We just forget it, right?”

“Aurora? Right, forget it. Bloody good idea, though.”

They drank. Karpov filled the glasses again. “Damn them all,” he proposed. “Screw Philby ... and the academician.”

Marchenko nodded in agreement, the brandy that had missed his mouth dripping off his jowls.

“Krilov? Asshole. Forget ’em all.”

It was midnight when Karpov staggered to his car. He leaned against a tree, stuck two fingers down his throat, and threw up what he could into the snow. Sucking in gulps of the freezing night air helped, but the drive to his dacha was murder. He made it with a scraped fender and two nasty scares. Ludmilla was still up, in a housecoat, and she put him to bed, terrified that he had actually driven out from Moscow in that condition.

On Saturday morning, John Preston drove down to
Tonbridge
to pick up his son, Tommy. As usual when his dad collected him from school, the boy was a torrent of words, memories of the term just past, projects for the term yet to come, plans for the holiday about to begin, praise for his best friends and their virtues, scorn for the infamies of those he disliked.

For Preston, the drive back to London was bliss. He mentioned the several things he had planned for their week together and was happy they seemed to meet with Tommy’s approval. The lad’s face fell only when he recalled he would be returned after a week to the smart, brittle, and pricelessly expensive Mayfair apartment where Julia lived with her boyfriend, a dress manufacturer. The man was old enough to be Tommy’s grandfather, and Preston suspected that any breakages in the flat would lead to a severe frost in the atmosphere.

“Dad,” said Tommy as they drove over Vauxhall Bridge, “why can’t I come and stay with you all the time?”

Preston sighed. It was not easy to explain the breakup of a marriage, or the cost of it, to a twelve-year-old. “Because,” he said carefully, “your mummy and Archie aren’t actually married. If I insisted on a formal divorce, Mummy could ask for and get an allowance from me called maintenance. Which, incidentally, I couldn’t afford, not on my salary. At least, not enough to keep myself, you at school, and her. It just wouldn’t go that far. And if I couldn’t pay that allowance, the court might decide your best chances in life were with Mummy. So we wouldn’t get to see each other even as often as we do now.”

“I didn’t know it came down to money,” said the boy sadly.

“In the end, most things come down to money. Sad but true. Years ago, if I had been able to afford a better kind of life for all three of us, Mummy and I might not have broken up. I was just an Army officer, and even when I quit the Army to join the Home Office, the salary still wasn’t enough.”

“Just what
do
you do in the Home Office?” asked the boy. He was dropping the subject of his parents’ estrangement, the way the young will try to blank out something that hurts them.

“Oh, I’m a sort of minor civil servant,” said Preston.

“Gosh, that must be jolly dull.”

“Yes,” Preston conceded, “I suppose it is, really.”

Yevgeni
Karpov woke at noon with an imperial hangover that half a dozen aspirins were only just able to contain. After lunch he felt somewhat better and decided to go for a stroll.

There was something at the back of his mind—
a
memory, a half-recollection, that he had heard the name Krilov somewhere in the not-too-distant past. It bothered him. One of the restricted-list reference books he kept at the dacha had given him the details of Krilov, Vladimir Ilich: historian, professor at Moscow University, lifelong member of the Party, member of the Academy of Sciences, member of the Supreme Soviet, etc., etc. All that he knew; but there was something else. He plowed through the snow, his head bowed, deep in thought.

The boys had gone off on their skis to take advantage of the last of the good powder snow before the coming thaw spoiled it all. Ludmilla Karpova trailed along behind her husband. She knew his mood and refrained from interrupting. The previous evening she had been surprised but quite happy at the state he had been in. She knew he hardly ever drank—and never that heavily—which meant he had not been visiting his girlfriend. Perhaps he really had been with a colleague from the GRU, one of the so-called neighbors. Whatever, something had got on top of him, but it was not a partridge in the Arbat.

At just after three, whatever he had been racking his brains for came to him. He stopped several yards ahead of her, said, “Damn! Of course,” and perked up at once. All smiles, he took her arm, and they walked back to the dacha.

General Karpov knew he had some quiet research to do in his office the next morning, and that he would visit Professor Krilov in his Moscow apartment on Monday evening.

The phone call on Monday morning caught John Preston just as he was about to go out with his son.

“Mr. Preston? Dafydd Wynne-Evans here.”

For a moment the name meant nothing; then Preston recalled his request of Friday evening.

“I’ve had a look at your little piece of metal. Very interesting. Can you come out here and have a chat with me?”

“Well, actually, I’m taking a few days off,” said Preston. “Would the end of the week suit?”

There was a pause from the Aldermaston end. “I think it might be better before then, if you could spare the time.”

“Er
... oh ... well, could you give me the gist of it on the phone?”

“Much better if we talk about it face-to-face,” said Dr. Wynne-Evans.

Preston thought for a moment. He was taking Tommy to the Windsor Safari Park for the day. But that was also in Berkshire. “Could I come by this afternoon—say, about five?” he asked.

“Five it is,” said the scientist. “Ask for me at the desk. I’ll have you shown up.”

Professor Krilov lived on the top floor of an apartment building on
Komsomolski Prospekt
that provided commanding views of the Moskva River and was handy for the university on the southern bank. General Karpov pressed the buzzer at just after six o’clock, and it was the academic himself who answered it. He surveyed his visitor without recognition.

“Comrade Professor Krilov?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Yevgeni Karpov. I wonder if we might have a word or two?”

He held out his identification. Professor Krilov studied it, taking in Karpov’s rank and the fact that the visitor came from the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Then he handed it back and gestured Karpov to enter. He led the way to a well-furnished sitting room, took his guest’s coat, and bade him be seated.

“To what do I owe this honor?” he asked when he had seated himself opposite Karpov. He was a man of distinction in his own right, not in any way awed by a general of the KGB.