They waited in silence until the bus for Southampton arrived. The Czech left the canvas bag on the ground and boarded the bus. As the taillights disappeared toward the port city, the motorcyclist lifted the bag and walked back up the road to where he had left his motorcycle.
At dawn, haying ridden to Thetford to change clothes and switch vehicles, he arrived home in Cherryhayes Close, Ipswich, carrying the last of the scheduled list of components he had waited for these long weeks. Courier Nine had delivered.
Two days later, the stakeout on the house on Compton Street, Chesterfield, was one week old and had absolutely nothing to report.
The Stephanides brothers lived lives of impeccable uneventfulness. They rose at about nine, busied themselves about their house, where they appeared to do all their own cleaning and dusting, and left in their five-year-old car for their restaurant just before midday. They stayed there until close to midnight, when they returned home to sleep. There were no visitors and few phone calls. What calls there were involved orders for meat and vegetables or other harmless sundries.
Down at the restaurant at Holywell Cross, Len Stewart and his people reported much the same. The telephone was used more frequently, but again the talk was of orders for food, bookings for a table, or deliveries of wine. It was not possible for a watcher to dine there every night; the Greeks were apparently professionals who had spent years in the clandestine life and would have spotted a customer who came too frequently or loitered too long. But Stewart and his team did their best.
For the lads in the Royston house the main problem was boredom. Even Mr. and Mrs. Royston were tiring of the inconvenience caused by their presence after the initial excitement wore off. Royston had agreed to volunteer as a canvasser for the Conservative Party—he resolutely declined to assist anybody else—and the front windows of the house now bore posters in favor of the local Tory candidate.
This enabled more coming and going than usual, since anyone wearing a Conservative rosette seen leaving or entering the house would attract no attention from the neighbors. The ruse enabled Burkinshaw and his team, suitably rosetted, to take an occasional stroll while the Stephanides brothers were at their restaurant. It broke the monotony. The only one who seemed immune from boredom was Harry Burkinshaw.
For the rest, the principal distraction was television, kept at low volume, particularly when the Roystons were out, and the prime topic day and evening was the continuing election campaign. One week into the campaign, three things were becoming clear.
The Liberal/Social Democrat alliance had still failed to surge in the opinion polls and the issue seemed increasingly developing into the traditional race between the Conservatives and the Labour Party. The second factor was that all public-opinion polls indicated that the two main parties were much closer than could have been foreseen four years earlier, in 1983, when the Conservatives won a landslide; further, constituency-level polling indicated that the outcome in the eighty most marginal constituencies would almost certainly decide the color of the country’s next government. In every poll it was the “floating vote,” varying between ten and twenty percent, that held the balance.
The third development was that despite all the economic and ideological issues involved, and despite the efforts of all parties to make the most of them, the campaign was becoming increasingly dominated by the much more emotive issue of unilateral nuclear disarmament. In more and more polls the nuclear arms race issue was showing as the first or second priority of concern.
The pacifist movements, broadly Left and broadly united for once, were mounting what was in effe
ct a parallel campaign of their own. Huge demonstrations took place on an almost daily basis, rewarded with equally copious coverage by newspapers and television. The movements, while demonstrating no noticeable fund-raising organization, seemed able from their combined resources to hire hundreds of buses at commercial rates to transport their demonstrators hither and thither across the land.
Hard Left luminaries of the Labour Party, agnostics or atheists to a man, shared every public or TV platform with clerics of the trendier wing of the Anglican Church, where the members of one group spent their allocated air time nodding in grave agreement with the points made by the other.
Inevitably, even though the alliance was not unilateralist, the primary target of the disarmers was the Conservative Party, just as their primary ally became the Labour Party. The Party leader, supported by the National Executive, seeing which way the wind was blowing, publicly aligned himself and the Party to every one of the unilateralists’ demands.
Another theme that ran through the Left campaign was anti-Americanism. On a hundred platforms it rapidly became impossible for the interviewer or show host to extract from the disarmers’ spokesmen a single condemnatory word against Soviet Russia; the constantly reiterated theme was hatred of America, which was portrayed as warmongering, imperialistic, and a threat to world peace.
On Thursday, June 4, the campaign was enlivened by a sudden Soviet offer to “guarantee” to recognize the whole of Western Europe, neutrals and NATO nations alike, as a nuclear-free zone in perpetuity if America would do the same.
An attempt by the British Defense Minister to explain that (a) the removal of European-American defenses was verifiable while Soviet warhead detargeting was not, and (b) the Warsaw Pact had a four-to-one conventional-weapons superiority over NATO’s, was howled down twice before lunch, and the minister had to be removed from the grip of the pacifists by bodyguards.
“Anyone would think,” grumbled Harry Burkinshaw as he popped another mint, “that this election was a national referendum on nuclear disarmament.”
“It is,” said Preston sharply.
Friday found Major Petrofsky shopping in Ipswich. In an office-equipment shop he acquired a small steel cabinet, thirty inches tall, eighteen wide, and twelve deep, with a door that locked securely. From a hardware store he bought a light, short-handled, two-wheel dolly of the type used for shifting garbage cans or heavy suitcases. A lumber merchant yielded two ten-foot planks and a variety of laths, rods, and short joists, while a do-it-yourself shop sold him a complete toolbox including a high-speed drill with a selection of bits for steel or wood, plus nails, bolts, nuts, screws, a pair of heavy-duty industrial gloves, and several sheets of foam rubber. He rounded off the morning in an electrical-supply shop with the purchase of four nine-volt batteries and a selection of multicolored electrical wiring. It took two journeys in his hatchback sedan to bring the loads back to Cherryhayes Close, where he stored them in the garage. After dark he brought most of the gear inside the house.
That night the radio told him in Morse the details of the arrival of the assembler, the one event he had not been required to memorize. It would be Rendezvous X and the date Monday, the eighth. Tight, he thought, damn tight, but he would still be on target.
* * *
While Petrofsky was crouched over his one-time pad deciphering the message and the Stephanides brothers were serving moussaka and shish kebab to a line of people who had just left the nearby bars at closing time, Preston was in the police station, on the phone to Sir Bernard Hemmings.
“The question is, John, how long we can keep going up there in Chesterfield without any results,” said Sir Bernard.
“It’s only been a week, sir,” said Preston. “Stakeouts have lasted a lot longer.”
“Yes, I well know that. The thing is, we usually have more to go on. There’s a growing move here that advocates crashing in on the Greeks to see what it is they’ve got stashed away in that house, if anything. Why won’t you agree on a clandestine entry while they’re at work?”
“Because I think they’re top pros and they’d spot they’d been gone over. If that happened, they’d probably have a foolproof way of warning off their controller from ever visiting them again.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right. It’s all very well your sitting over that house like a tethered goat in India waiting for the tiger to come, but supposing the tiger doesn’t show?”
“I believe he will, sooner or later, Sir Bernard,” said Preston. “Please, give me a bit more time.”
“All right,” conceded Hemmings after a pause for a consultation at the other end. “A week, John. Next Friday I’ll have to jack up the Special Branch lads to go in there and take the place apart. Let’s face it, the man you’re looking for could have been inside there all the time.”