“I’m not in work at present, sir. I’m on compulsory leave.”
“So I gather. Something that happened in Glasgow, was it?”
“You haven’t received a report yet on the Glasgow incident of last week? It concerned a Russian seaman, a man I believe was a courier. Surely that involves Six?”
“Doubtless it will be on its way before long,” said Sir Nigel carefully. “Would you be kind enough to tell me about it?”
Preston started at the beginning and told the tale through to the end, so far as he knew it. Sir Nigel sat as if lost in thought, which he was: taking in every word with part of his mind and calculating with the rest.
They would not really try it, would they? he was thinking. Not breach the Fourth protocol? Or would they? Desperate men sometimes take desperate measures, and he had several reasons to know that in a number of areas—food production, the economy, the war in Afghanistan—the USSR was in desperate waters. He noted that Preston had stopped talking. “Do forgive me,” he said. “What do you deduce from it all?”
“I believe Semyonov was not a merchant navy deckhand, but a courier. That conclusion seems to me unavoidable. I do not believe he would have gone to those lengths to protect what he was carrying, or to end his life to avoid what he must have thought would be interrogation by us, unless he had been instructed his mission was of crucial importance.”
“Fair enough,” conceded Sir Nigel. “And so?”
“And so I believe there was an intended recipient of that disk of polonium, either directly through a rendezvous or indirectly by dead drop. That means there’s an illegal here, on the ground. I think we should try to find him.”
Sir Nigel pursed his lips. “If he’s a top illegal, finding him will be a needle-in-a-haystack affair,” he murmured.
“Yes, I know that.”
“If you had not been sent on compulsory leave, what would you have sought authority to do?”
“I think, Sir Nigel, that one disk of polonium is of no use to anybody. Whatever the illegal is up to, there must be other components. Now, it seems that whoever mounted the Semyonov incursion has taken a policy decision not to use the Soviet Embassy’s diplomatic bag. I don’t know why—it would have been much easier to ship a small, lead-lined package into Britain in the embassy bag and have one of their Line N people leave it at a dead drop for collection by the man on the ground. So I ask myself why they didn’t just do that. And the short answer is, I don’t know.”
“Right,” conceded Sir Nigel, “and so?”
“So if there has been one consignment—useless in itself—there must be others. Some may have already arrived. On the law of averages, there must be more yet to come. And apparently they are coming in via ‘mules,’ who pose as harmless seamen and God knows what else besides.”
“And you would want to do—what?” asked Sir Nigel.
Preston took a deep breath. “I would have wanted”—he stressed the conditional—“to check back on all entrants from the Soviet Union over the past forty, fifty, even one hundred days. We could not count on another mugging by hooligans, but there might have been some other incident. I would have tightened up controls on all entrants from the USSR, and even from the whole East Bloc, to see if we could intercept another component. As head of C5(C) I could have done that.”
“And you think now that you won’t get the chance?”
Preston shook his head. “Even if I were allowed to go back to work tomorrow, I’m pretty certain I would be off the case. Apparently I’m an alarmist and I make waves.”
Sir Nigel nodded pensively. “Poaching between the services is not regarded as terribly good form,” he said, as if thinking aloud. “When I asked you to go down to South Africa for me, it was Sir Bernard who sanctioned it. Later I learned that the assignment, however temporary, had caused—how shall I put it?—some hostility in certain quarters at Charles Street.
“Now, I don’t need an open quarrel with my sister service. On the other hand, I take a view, shared by yourself, that there might be more to this iceberg than the tip. In short, you have four weeks’ leave. Would you be prepared to spend that time working on this case?”
“For whom?” asked Preston, bewildered.
“For me,” said Sir Nigel. “You couldn’t come to Sentinel. You’d be seen. Word would get around.”
“Then where would I work?”
“Here,” said C. “It’s small but comfortable. I have the authority to ask for exactly the same information as you would if you were at your desk. Any incident involving a Soviet or East Bloc arrival will have been recorded, either on paper or in a computer. Since you cannot get to the files or the computer, I can arrange for the files and printouts to be brought to you. What do you say?”
“If Charles Street finds out, I’m finished at Five,” said Preston. He was thinking of his salary, of his pension, of the chances of getting another job at his age, of Tommy.
“How much longer do you think you have got at Charles under its present management?” asked Sir Nigel.
Preston laughed shortly. “Not long,” he said. “All right, sir, I’ll do it. I want to stay on this case. There’s something buried in there somewhere.”
Sir Nigel nodded approvingly. “You’re a tenacious man, John. I like tenacity. It usually yields results. Be here on Monday at nine. I’ll have two of my own lads waiting for you. Ask them for what you want, and they’ll get it.”
On Monday morning, April 20, as Preston started work in the Chelsea flat, an internationally famous Czech concert pianist arrived at Heathrow Airport from Prague, en route to his Wigmore Hall concert the following evening.