The airport authorities had been alerted, and in deference to the musician’s venerability, customs and immigration formalities were as little onerous as possible. The elderly pianist was met after the customs hall by a representative of the sponsoring organization and, with his small entourage, was whisked off to his suite at the Cumberland Hotel.
His retinue consisted of his dresser, who looked after his clothes and other personal effects with dedicated devotion; a female secretary who handled his fan mail and correspondence; and his personal aide, a tall, lugubrious man named Lichka, who took care of finances and negotiations with host organizations, and seemed to live on a diet of antacid tablets.
That Monday, Lichka was working his way through an abnormally large number of his pills. He had not wanted to do what was required of him, but the men from the StB had been extremely persuasive. No one in his right mind deliberately affronted the men of the StB, Czechoslovakia’s secret police and intelligence organization, or wished to be invited for further discussions at their headquarters, the dreaded “Monastery.” The men had made plain that Lichka’s granddaughter’s admission to the university would be so much easier to arrange if he were prepared to help them—a polite way of saying the girl did not stand a chance of entering if he failed them.
When they had given him back his shoes, he could find no trace of interference, and according to instructions had worn them on the flight and straight through Heathrow Airport.
That evening, a man walked up to the reception desk and politely asked the number of Lichka’s room. Equally politely he was given it. Five minutes later, at the precise hour Lichka had been briefed to expect it, there was a soft knock at his door. A piece of paper was pushed under it. He checked the identification code, opened the door five inches, and passed out a plastic bag containing his shoes. Unseen hands took the bag and Lichka closed the door. When he had flushed the scrap of paper down the toilet, he sighed with relief. It had been easier than he had expected. Now, he thought, we can get on with the business of making music.
Before midnight, in a backwater of Ipswich, the shoes joined the plaster cast and the radio in a bottom drawer. Courier Four had delivered.
Sir Nigel Irvine visited Preston at the Chelsea apartment on Friday afternoon. The MI5 man was looking exhausted, and the flat was awash with files and computer printout paper.
He had spent five days and had come up with nothing. He had started with every entry into Britain from the USSR over the past forty days. There had been hundreds: trade delegates, industrial buyers, journalists, trade-union stooges, a choir group from Georgia, a dance troupe of Cossacks, ten athletes and all their entourage, and a team of doctors for a medical conference in Manchester. And those were just the Russians.
Also entering from the Soviet Union were the returning tourists: the culture-vultures who had been admiring the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, the school party that had been singing in Kiev, and the “peace” delegation that had been providing rich fodder for the Soviet propaganda machine by condemning its own country at press conferences in Moscow and Kharkov.
Even that list did not include the Aeroflot crews who had been shuttling in and out as part of the normal air traffic, so First Officer Romanov hardly rated a mention.
There was, of course, no reference to a Dane coming into Birmingham from Paris and leaving through Manchester.
By Wednesday, Preston had had two options; stay with entrants from the USSR but go back sixty days, or widen the net to take in all entrants from any East Bloc country. That meant thousands and thousands of arrivals. He had decided to stay with his forty-day time scale but to include the non-Soviet Communist states. The paperwork began to get waist-high.
Customs had
been most helpful. There had been some confiscations, but always for an excess of the duty-free allowance. Nothing of inexplicable character had been seized. Immigration had come up with no “bent” passports, but that was to be expected. The weird and wonderful bits of paperwork sometimes proffered at passport control by people from the Third World were never produced by people from the Communist bloc. Not even time-expired passports, the usual reason for an immigration officer’s stopping a visitor from entry. In Communist countries a traveler’s passport was so thoroughly checked before departure that there was little chance of his being detained at the British end.
“And that,” said Preston gloomily, “still leaves the uncheckables—the merchant seamen, entering without controls at more than twenty commercial ports; the crews from the fishing factory ships now riding off Scotland; the commercial aircrews, who are hardly checked at all; and those with diplomatic cover.”
“As I thought,” said Sir Nigel. “Not easy. Have you any idea what you are looking for?”
“Yes, sir. I had one of your lads spend Monday out at Aldermaston with the people in nuclear engineering. It seems that disk of polonium would be suitable for a device that was small, crude, basic in design, and not very powerful—if one can describe any atomic bomb as ‘not very powerful.’ ” He handed Sir Nigel a list of items. “Those are, at a guess, something like what we are looking for.”
C studied the list of artifacts. “Is that all it takes?” he asked at length.
“In kit form, apparently, yes. I’d no idea they could be made so basic. Apart from the fissionable core and the steel tamper, that stuff could be hidden almost anywhere and excite no attention.”
“All right, John, where do you go now?”
“I’m looking for a pattern, Sir Nigel. It’s all I can look for. A pattern of entries and exits by the same passport number. If one or two couriers are being used, they would have to come in and out frequently, using different entry and exit points, probably different departure points abroad; but if a pattern shows up, we could put out an all-nation alert for a limited group of passport numbers. It’s not much, but it’s all I have.”
Sir Nigel rose. “Keep at it, John. I’ll get you access to anything you ask for. Let’s just pray whoever we are dealing with slips up, just once, by using the same courier twice or three times.”
But Major Volkov was more efficient than that. He did not slip up. He had no idea what the components were or what they were to be used for. He simply knew he had been ordered to ensure their entry into Britain in time for a series of rendezvous, that each courier would have memorized his primary and backup meets, and that nothing was to pass through the KGB rezidentura in the London embassy.
He had nine cargoes to infiltrate and twelve couriers prepared. Some, he knew, were not professionals, but where their cover was impeccable and their journey had been arranged weeks or months earlier, as in the case of Lichka the Czech, he had homed in on them.
In order not to alert Major General Borisov by stripping him of a further twelve illegals and their legends, he had cast his net wider than the USSR by calling on three of the sister services: the StB of Czechoslovakia, the SB of Poland, and, most of all, the obedient and unquestioning Haupt Verwaltung Aufklärung (HVA) of East Germany.
The East Germans were particularly good. While there are Polish and Czech communities in West Germany, France, and Britain, the East Germans had one great advantage. Because of the ethnic identicality of East and West Germans, and the feet that millions of former Easterners had already fled to West Germany, the HVA, from its East Berlin base, ran by far a greater number of in-place illegals in the West than any other East Bloc service.
Volkov had decided to use only two Russians, and they would be the first to go in. He had no way of knowing that one would be mugged by street thugs, nor was he aware that the false seaman’s consignment was no longer locked up in a Glasgow police station. He just took treble precautions because that was his nature and his training.
For his remaining seven cargoes he was using one courier supplied by the Poles, two by the Czechs (including Lichka), and four by the East Germans. The tenth courier, replacing the dead Courier Two, would also come from the Poles. For the structural alterations that he needed to make to two motor vehicles, Volkov was even using a garage and workshop run by the HVA in Brunswick, West Germany.
Only the two Russians and the Czech, Lichka, would have East Bloc departure points; plus, now, the tenth, who would have to come from the Polish Airline, LOT.
Volkov was simply not allowing the appearance of any of the patterns Preston now sought in his sea of paperwork in Chelsea.