The trooper had been good. Petrofsky had taken one slug in the left knee, one in the lower stomach, and one in the right shoulder. His pistol had been flung across the room. Despite the distortion caused by the door’s woodwork, the trooper had connected with three out of four slugs. Petrofsky was in hideous pain, but he was alive. He began to crawl. Twelve feet away he could see the gray steel, the flat box on its side, the two buttons, one yellow and one red. Captain Lyndhurst took careful aim and fired once.
John Preston ran past him so fast he jostled the officer’s hip. He went down on his knees beside the body on the floor. The Russian was lying on his side, half the back of his head blown away, his mouth still working as if he were a fish on a slab. Preston bent his head to the dying face. Lyndhurst still had his gun at the aim, but the MI5 man was between him and the Russian. He stepped to one side to get a clearer shot, then lowered the Browning. Preston was rising. There was no need for a second shot.
“We’d better get the wallahs from Aldermaston to have a look at that,” said Lyndhurst, gesturing at the steel cabinet in the corner.
“I wanted him alive,” said Preston.
“Sorry, old boy. Couldn’t be done,” said the captain.
At that moment both men jumped at the sound of a loud click and a voice speaking to them from the sideboard. They saw that the sound had come from a large radio set, which had switched itself on with a timer device. The voice said:
“Good evening. This is Radio Moscow, the English-language service, and here is the ten o’clock news. In Terry ... I’m sorry, I’ll say that again. In Teheran today, the government stated—”
Captain Lyndhurst stepped over and switched the machine off The man on the floor stared at the carpet with sightless eyes, immune to the coded message meant for him alone.
Chapter 23
The lunch invitation was for one o’clock on Friday, June 19, at Brooks’s Club in St. James’s. Preston entered the portals at that hour, but even before he could announce himself to the club porter in the booth to his right, Sir Nigel was striding down the marbled hall to meet him. “My dear John, how kind of you to come.”
They adjourned to the bar for a pre-lunch drink, and the conversation was informal. Preston was able to tell the Chief that he had just returned from Hereford, where he had visited Steve Bilbow in the hospital. The staff sergeant had had a lucky escape. Only when the flattened slugs from the Russian’s gun were removed from his body armor did one of the doctors notice a sticky smear and have it analyzed. The cyanide compound had failed to enter the bloodstream; the SAS man had been saved by the trauma pads. Otherwise he was heavily bruised, slightly dented, but in good shape.
“Excellent,” said Sir Nigel with genuine enthusiasm, “one does so hate to lose a good man.”
For the rest, most of the bar was discussing the election result and many of those present had been up half the night waiting for the final results in the close-fought contest to come in from the provinces.
At half past the hour they went in to lunch. Sir Nigel had a corner table where they could talk in privacy. On the way in they passed the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Martin Flannery, coming the other way. Although they all knew each other, Sir Martin saw at once that his colleague was “in conference.” The mandarins acknowledged each other’s presence with an imperceptible inclination of the head, sufficient for two scholars of Oxford. Backslapping is best left to foreigners.
“I really asked you here, John,” said C as he spread his linen napkin over his knees, “to offer you my thanks and my congratulations. A remarkable operation and an excellent result. I suggest the rack of lamb, quite delicious at this time of year.”
“As to the congratulations, sir, I fear I can hardly accept them,” said Preston quietly.
Sir Nigel studied the menu through his half-moon glasses. “Indeed? Are you being admirably modest or not so admirably discourteous? Ah, beans, carrots, and perhaps a roast potato, my dear.”
“Simply realistic, I hope,” said Preston when the waitress departed, “Might we discuss the man we knew as Franz Winkler?“
“Whom you so brilliantly tailed to Chesterfield.”
“Permit me to be frank, Sir Nigel. Winkler could not have shaken off a headache with a box of aspirins. He was an incompetent and a fool.”
“I believe he almost lost you all at Chesterfield railway station.”
“A fluke,” said Preston. “With a bigger watcher operation, we’d have had men at each stop along the line. The point is, his maneuvers were clumsy; they told us he was a pro, and a bad one at that, yet failed to shake us.”
“I see. What else about Winkler? Ah, the lamb, and cooked to perfection.”
They waited until they were served and the waitress was gone. Preston picked at his food, troubled. Sir Nigel ate with enjoyment.
“Franz Winkler came into Heathrow with a genuine Austrian passport containing a valid British visa.”
“So he did, to be sure,”
“And we both know, as did the immigration officer, that Austrian citizens do not need a visa to enter Britain. Any consular officer of ours in Vienna would have told Winkler that. It was the visa that prompted the passport control officer at Heathrow to run the passport number through the computer. And it turned out to be false.”
“We all make mistakes,” murmured Sir Nigel.
“The KGB does not make that kind of mistake, sir. Their documentation is accurate to the point of brilliance.”
“Don’t overestimate them, John. All large organizations occasionally make a balls-up. More carrots? No? Then, if I may ...”