Sir Nigel Irvine, like so many who have to work in central London, tried to get away at the weekends for a breath of fresh air. He and Lady Irvine stayed in London during the week but kept a small, rustic cottage in southeast Dorset, on the Isle of Purbeck, at a village called Langton Matravers.
That Sunday C had donned a tweed coat and hat, taken a thick ash stick, and walked down the lanes and tracks to the cliffs above Chapman’s Pool at St. Alban’s Head. The sun was bright but the wind chilly. It blew the silver wisps of hair that escaped his hat away over his ears like small wings. He took the cliff path and walked deep in thought, occasionally pausing to stare out over the tossed whitecaps of the English Channel.
He was thinking of the conclusions of Preston’s original report and of the remarkable concurrence of Sweeting in his Oxford reclusiveness. Coincidence? Straws in the wind? Grounds for conviction? Or just a lot of nonsense from a too-imaginative civil servant and a fanciful academic?
And if it was all true, could there be any link with a small disk of polonium from Leningrad that had arrived uninvited in a Glasgow police station?
If the metal disk was what Wynne-Evans had said, what did that signify? Could it possibly mean that someone, far out over those tossing waves, was really trying to breach the Fourth Protocol?
And if that was true, who could that someone be? Chebrikov and Kryuchkov of the KGB? They would never dare act except under the orders of the General Secretary. And if the General Secretary was behind it all—why?
And why not use the diplomatic bag? So much simpler, easier, safer. To this last question, he thought he could discern an answer. Using the embassy bag would mean using the KGB rezidentura inside the embassy. Better than Chebrikov, Kryuchkov, or the General Secretary, C knew that the rezidentura had been penetrated. He had his source Andreyev inside it.
The General Secretary, C suspected, had good reason to be shaken by the recent spate of defections from the KGB. All the evidence coming across was that the disillusionment at every level in Russia had become so profound that it was even affecting the elite of elites. Apart from the defections, starting in the late 1970s and growing through the 1980s there had been mass expulsions of Soviet diplomats across the world, caused in part by their own desperation to recruit agents, but leading to even further desperation as the diplomatic controllers were compelled to leave and the networks fell into disarray. Even Third World countries that, a decade ago, had danced to the Soviet tune were now asserting themselves and expelling Soviet agents for grossly undiplomatic conduct.
Yes, a major operation conducted outside the auspices of the KGB made sense. Sir Nigel had heard on good authority that the General Secretary was becoming paranoid about the level of Western penetration of the KGB itself. For every traitor who runs over, went the adage in the intelligence community, you can bet there’s another one still in place.
So, there was a man out there, running couriers and their cargoes into Britain, dangerous cargoes, bringing anarchy and chaos in a manner that C could not yet discern but was ceasing to doubt, even as he walked. And that man worked for another man, very high, who had no love for this small island.
“But you won’t find them, John,” he murmured to the unheeding wind. “You’re good, but they are better. And they hold the aces.”
Sir Nigel Irvine was one of the last
of the old grandees, one of a passing breed, being replaced at every level of his society by new men of a different type, even at the highest stratum of the civil service, where continuity of style and type was something of a household god.
So he gazed out at the Channel, as so many Englishmen had done before him, and made his decision. He was not convinced of the existence of a threat to the land of his forefathers, only of the possibility of such a menace. But that was enough.
Farther along the coast, on the downs above the small Sussex port of Newhaven, another man gazed at the tossing waves of the English Channel.
He was dressed in black leather, his helmet on the seat of his parked BMW motorcycle. A few Sunday strollers walked with their children across the downs, but they took no notice of him.
He was watching the approach of a ferry, well over the horizon and beating her way toward the shelter of the harbor mole. The Cornouailles would arrive from Dieppe in thirty minutes. Somewhere on board should be Courier Five.
In fact, Courier Five was on the foredeck, watching the approach of the English coast. He was one of those who had no car, but his ticket was for the boat train right through to London.
Anton Zelewski, his passport said, and it was perfectly accurate. A West German passport, the immigration officer noted, but there was nothing odd in that. Hundreds of thousands of West Germans have Polish-sounding names. He was passed through.
Customs examined his suitcase and his bag with the duty-free allowance, bought on board the ship. His bottle of gin and his twenty-five cigars in an unopened box were within the permitted limits. The customs officer nodded him through and turned his attention to someone else.
Zelewski had indeed bought a box of twenty-five good cigars in the duty-free shop on the Cornouailles. He had then retired to a bathroom, locked himself in, and eased the identifying duty-free labels off the newly bought box, only to stick them on an identical box he had brought with him. The other went overboard into the waiting sea.
On the train to London, Zelewski sought out the first-class carriage next to the engine, selected the required window seat, and waited. Just before Lewes, the door opened and a man in black leather stood there. A glance confirmed that the compartment was empty except for the German.
“Does this train go straight to London?” he asked in unaccented English.
“I believe it also stops at Lewes,” Zelewski replied.
The man held out his hand. Zelewski passed him the flat box of cigars. The man stuffed it under his jacket, nodded, and left. When the train started out of Lewes, Zelewski saw the man once again, on the opposite platform, waiting for a train back to Newhaven.
Before midnight the cigars joined the radio, plaster cast, and shoes in Ipswich. Courier Five had delivered.
Chapter 17
Sir Nigel was right. By Thursday, the last day of April, the reams of computer printout had shown up no pattern at all of East Bloc citizens, from whatever point of departure, entering Britain on repeated occasions over the previous forty days. Nor was there a pattern of persons of any particular nationality entering the country from the East over the same period.
A number of passports containing various irregularities had shown up, but that was par for the course. Each had been checked, its bearer strip-searched, but the answer was still a big zero. Three passports on the “stop” list had appeared; two were previous deportees seeking reentry, and one was an American underworld figure connected to gambling and narcotics. These three were also searched before being put on the next plane out, but there was not an iota of evidence that they had been couriers for Moscow.
If they’re using West Bloc citizens, or in-place illegals with impeccable documentation as West Bloc citizens, I’ll never find them, thought Preston.