His set was not a transmitter; Moscow would never allow a valuable illegal to endanger himself by sending his own messages, not with British and American direction-finding countermeasures as good as they were. What he had was a huge Braun radio, purchasable in any good electronics shop, that would pick up almost any channel in the world.
Petrofsky was tense. It had been a month since he had used the Poplar transmitter to alert Moscow that he had lost a courier and his cargo and ask for a replacement. Each second evening and on alternate mornings, whenever he was not out on his motorcycle making collections, he had listened for a reply. So far, it had not come.
At ten past ten that evening, he heard his own call sign coming over the airwaves. He already had his pad and pencil ready. After a pause, the message began. He jotted down the letters, a jumble of undecipherable figures, straight from Morse into English. The Germans, British, and Americans would be recording the same letters in their various listening posts.
When the transmission ended, he switched off the set, sat at his dressing table, selected the appropriate one-time pad, and began to decipher. He had it in fifteen minutes: Firebird Ten replacing Two RVT. It was repeated three times.
He knew Rendezvous T. It was one of the alternates, to be used only if the occasion demanded, as indeed it now had. And it was in an airport hotel. He preferred wayside cafés or railway stations, but knew that although he was the kingpin of the operation, there were some couriers who for professional reasons had only a few hours in London and could not leave the city.
There was one other problem. They were slotting Courier Ten between two other meets, and perilously close to the rendezvous with Courier Seven.
Ten had to be met at the hour of breakfast in the Post House, Heathrow; Seven would be waiting in a hotel parking lot outside Colchester that same morning at eleven. It would mean hard riding, but he could do it.
Late in the evening of Tuesday, May 12, the lights were still burning in 10 Downing Street, office and residence of the British premier. Mrs. Margaret Thatcher had called a strategy conference of her closest advisers and inner cabinet. The only issue on the agenda was that of the forthcoming general election; the meeting was to formalize the decision and decide the timing.
As usual, she made her own view plain from the outset. She believed she would be right to go for a third four-year administration, even though the constitution allowed her to govern until June 1988. There were several who at once doubted the wisdom of going to the country so soon, though on previous evidence they doubted they would get very far. When the British Prime Minister had a gut feeling for something, it took some very powerful counterarguments to dissuade her. On this issue, statistics seemed to support her.
The Conservative Party chairman had all the public-opinion-poll findings at his fingertips. The Liberal/Social Democrat alliance, these showed, seemed stuck at about twenty percent of the support of the national electorate. Under the British system, this would give them between fifteen and twenty seats in Parliament. That left the electoral fight looking like the traditional struggle between the Conservative and Labour parties.
As for the timing, the indicators seemed to support the Prime Minister in her wish for an early election. Since June 1983, with its newfound image of tolerance, unity, and moderation, the Labour Party had hauled itself back a full ten percentage points in the polls, and stood only four percent behind the Conservatives. Moreover, the gap could well be closing. The Hard Left was almost mute, the Labour manifesto moderated, and public television appearances confined to members of Labour’s centrist wing. In short, the British public had almost completely regained its confidence in Labour as an alternative party of government.
There was general agreement by midnight that it had to be the summer of 1987, or not until June 1988. Mrs. Thatcher pressed for 1987 and won her point. On the question of the length of the election campaign, she urged a short, three-week snap campaign as against the more traditional four weeks. Again, she won her argument.
Finally, it was agreed; she would seek an audience with the Queen on Thursday, May 28, and ask for a dissolution of Parliament. In accordance with tradition she would return to Downing Street immediately afterward to make a public statement. From that moment the election campaign would be on. Polling day would be Thursday, June 18.
While the ministers still slept in the hour before dawn, the BMW cruised toward London from the northeast. Petrofsky rode out to the Post House Hotel at Heathrow Airport, parked, locked the machine, and shut away his crash helmet in the box behind the pillion.
He eased off his black leather jacket and zip-sided trousers. Beneath the leather trousers he wore an ordinary pair of gray flannels, creased but passable. He dropped his jackboots into one of the saddlebags, from which he had taken a pair of shoes. The leathers went into the other bag, from which came a nondescript tweed jacket and tan raincoat. When he left the parking lot and walked into the hotel reception area, he was just an ordinary man in an ordinary mackintosh.
* * *
Karel Wosniak had not slept well. For one thing, he had been given the shock of his life the previous evening. Normally the aircrews of the Polish LOT airlines, for which he was a senior steward, passed through customs and immigration almost as a formality. This time they had been searched, really searched. When the British officer attending to him had started to rummage through his shaving kit he had nearly been sick from worry. When the man extracted the electric razor the SB people had given him in Warsaw before takeoff, he had thought he would faint. Fortunately it was not a battery-operated or rechargeable model. There had been no available electric plug to turn it on. The officer had put it back and completed his search, to no avail. Wosniak supposed that if someone had turned the shaver on, it would not have worked. After all, there must be something in it apart from the usual motor. Why else should he be required to bring it to London?
At eight precisely, he entered the men’s room just off the reception area on the hotel’s ground floor. A nondescript-looking man in a tan raincoat was washing his hands. Damn, thought Wosniak, when the contact shows up, we’ll have to wait until this Englishman leaves. Then the man spoke to him, in English.
“ ’Morning. Is that the Yugoslav airline uniform?”
Wosniak sighed with relief. “No, I am from the Polish national airline.”
“Lovely country, Poland,” said the stranger, wiping his hands. He seemed completely at ease.
Wosniak was new to this—and he had promised himself this would be the first and last time. He just stood on the tiled floor, holding his razor. “I have spent many happy times in your country,” the stranger continued.
That’s it, thought Wosniak. “Many happy times ...” the phrase of identification.
He held out the razor. The Englishman scowled and glanced at one of the booth doors. With a start, Wosniak realized the door was closed; there was someone in there. The stranger nodded to the shelf above the washbasins. Wosniak put the razor on it. Then the Englishman nodded toward the urinals. Hastily Wosniak unzipped his fly and stood in front of one. “Thank you,” the burbled. “I, too, think it is beautiful.”
The man in the tan raincoat pocketed the razor, held up five fingers to indicate that Wosniak should stay there for five minutes, and left.
An hour later, Petrofsky and his motorcycle were clearing the suburbs where northeast London borders the county of Essex. The M12 motorway opened up in front of him. It was nine o’clock.
At that hour the Tor Britannia ferry of the DFDS line from Gothenburg was easing herself alongside the Parkstone Quay at Harwich, eighty miles away on the Essex coast. The passengers, when they came off, were the usual crowd of tourists, students, and commercial visitors. Among the latter was Mr. Stig Lundqvist, who was driving his big Saab sedan.
His papers said he was a Swedish businessman and they did not lie. He was indeed Swedish, and had been all his life. The papers omitted to mention that he was also a longtime Communist agent who worked, like Herr Helmut Dorn, for the redoubtable General Marcus Wolf, the Jewish head of foreign operations for the East German HVA intelligence service.
Lundqvist was asked to step out of his car and bring his suitcases to the examination bench. This he did with a courteous smile. A customs officer lifted the Saab’s hood and glanced at the engine. He was looking for a globe the size of a small football or a rodlike tube that might be secreted within the compartment. There was nothing like that. He glanced under the frame of the car and finally into the trunk. He sighed. These demands from London were a pain in the neck. The trunk contained nothing but the usual toolkit, a jack strapped to one side, and a fire extinguisher banded to the other. The Swede stood at his side, his suitcases in his hand.
“Please,” said the Swede, “is all right?”