The Fourth Protocol (46 page)

“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.”

“I don’t believe he is.
Winkler
would never have visited the lair of the tiger himself. I believe he’s still out there somewhere, and that he’ll come.”

“Very well. One week, John. Friday next, it is.”

Sir Bernard hung up. Preston stared at the handset. The election was thirteen days away. He was beginning to feel dejected, that he could have been wrong all along. Nobody else, with the possible exception of Sir Nigel, believed in his hunch. A small disk of polonium and a low-level Czech bagman were not much to go on, and might not even be linked.

“All right, Sir Bernard,” he told the buzzing receiver, “one week. After that I’m packing it in, anyway.”

The Finnair jet from Helsinki arrived the following Monday afternoon, on time, as usual, and its complement of passengers passed through Heathrow without undue problems. One of them was a tall, bearded man of middle age whose Finnish passport claimed him to be Urho Nuutila, and whose fluent command of the language could be partly explained by his Karelian parentage. He was in fact a Russian named Vassiliev, by profession a scientist in nuclear engineering attached to the Soviet Army Artillery, Ordnance Research Directorate. He spoke passable English.

Having cleared customs, he took the airport courtesy bus to the Heathrow Penta Hotel, walked in through the front, kept going right past reception, and emerged at the rear door, which gave onto the parking lot. He waited by that door in the late-afternoon sunshine, unnoticed by anyone, until a small hatchback sedan drew abreast of him. The driver had his window open. “Is this where the buses from the airport drop the passengers?” he asked.

“No,” said the traveler. “I think that is around the front.”

“Where are you from?” asked the young man.

“Finland, actually,” said the bearded one.

“It must be cold in Finland.”

“No, at this time of year it is very hot. The main problem is the mosquitoes.”

The young man nodded. Vassiliev walked around the car and climbed in. They drove off.

“Name?” asked Petrofsky.

“Vassiliev.”

“That’ll do. Nothing more. I’m Ross.”

“Far to go?” asked Vassiliev.

“About two hours.”

They drove the rest of the way in silence. Petrofsky made three separate maneuvers to detect a tail, had there been one. They arrived at Cherryhayes Close by the last light of day. On the next-door patch
of front
lawn Petrofsky
’s
neighbor Mr. Armitage was mowing the grass.

“Company?” Armitage asked as Vassiliev descended from the car and walked to the front door.

Petrofsky took his guest’s single small suitcase from the back and winked at his neighbor. “Head office,” he whispered. “Best behavior. Might get promotion.”

“Oh, I should think so, then.” Armitage grinned and nodded in encouragement, and went on mowing.

Inside the sitting room, Petrofsky closed the curtains as he always did before putting on the light. Vassiliev stood motionless in the gloom. “Right,” he said when the lights went on. “To business. Have you got all nine consignments that were sent to you?”

“Yes. All nine.”

“Let’s confirm them. One child’s ball, weighing about twenty kilograms.”

“Check.”

“One pair shoes, one box cigars, one plaster cast.”

“Check.”

“One transistor radio, one electric shaver, one steel tube, extremely heavy.”

“That must be this.” Petrofsky went to a closet and held up a short length of heavy metal in heat-resistant cladding.

“It is,” said Vassiliev. “Finally, one handheld fire extinguisher, unusually heavy, and one pair car headlights, also very heavy.”

“Check.”

“Well, that’s it, then. If you’ve got the rest of the innocent commercial purchases, I’ll start assembling in the morning.”

“Why not now?”

“Look, young man. First of all, the sawing and drilling is hardly going to please the neighbors at this hour. Second, I’m tired. With this kind of toy you don’t make mistakes. I’ll start fresh tomorrow and be finished by sundown.”

Petrofsky nodded. “Take the back bedroom. I’ll run you to Heathrow on Wednesday in time for the morning flight.”

Vassiliev
elected to work in the sitting room, with the curtains closed and by electric light. First he asked for the nine consignments to be assembled.

“We’ll need a garbage bag,” he said. Petrofsky fetched him one from the kitchen.

“Pass the items to me as I ask for them,” said the assembler. “First, the cigar box.”

He broke open the seals and lifted the lid. The box contained two layers of cigars, thirteen on the top and twelve below; each cigar was wrapped in an aluminum tube.

“It should be third from the left, bottom row.”

It was. He emptied the cigar from its tube and slit it open with a razor. From the sliced tobacco inside he withdrew a slim glass phial with a crimped end and two twisted wires sticking out. An electrical detonator. The waste went into the bag.

“Plaster cast.”

The cast had been made in two layers, the first allowed to harden before the second was applied. Between the two layers a sheet of gray, puttylike substance had been rolled flat, encased in polyethylene to prevent adhesion, and wrapped around the arm. Vassiliev prized the two layers of plaster of
paris
apart, peeled the gray substance from its cavity, pulled away the polyethylene protector sheets, and rolled it back into a ball. Half a pound of plastic explosive.

Given Lichka’s shoes, he cut away the heels of both. From one came a steel disk two inches in diameter and one inch thick. Its rim was threaded to turn it into a broad, flat screw, and one surface had a deep cut to take a wide-headed screwdriver. From the other heel came a flatter, two-inch-wide disk of gray metal; it was lithium, an inert metal that, when bonded during the explosion to the polonium, would form the initiator and cause the atomic reaction to reach its full force.

The complementary disk of polonium came from the electric shaver that had so worried Karel Wosniak, and replaced the one lost in Glasgow. There were five of the smuggled consignments left.

The heat-resistant cladding on the exhaust pipe from the Hanomag truck was stripped away to reveal an eighteen-inch-long steel tube weighing twenty kilograms. It had an internal diameter of two inches, external four inches, for the metal’s thickness was one inch and it was of hardened steel. One end was flanged and threaded internally, the other capped with steel. The capping had a small hole in the center, capable of allowing the electrical detonator to be passed through it.

From First
Ofiïcer
Romanov’s transistor radio Vassiliev extracted the timer device; a flat, sealed steel box, the size of two cigarette packs placed end to end. On one face it had two large round buttons, one red and one yellow; from the other side protruded two colored wires, negative and positive. Each corner had an earlike lug with a hole, for bolting to the outside of the steel cabinet that would contain the bomb.

Taking the fire extinguisher that had arrived in Lundqvist’s Saab, the assembler unscrewed the base, which the preparation team had cut open, reassembled, and repainted to hide the seam. Out of the interior came not fire-damping foam but wadding, and last of all a heavy rod of leadlike metal, five inches long and two inches in diameter. Small though it was, it still weighed four and a half kilograms. Vassiliev pulled on the heavy gloves to handle it. It was pure uranium-235.

“Isn’t that stuff radioactive?” asked Petrofsky, who was watching in fascination.

“Yes, but not dangerously so. People think that all radioactive materials are dangerous to the same degree. Not so. Luminous watches are radioactive, but we wear them. Uranium is an alpha emitter, low-level. Now,
plutonium
—that’s really lethal. So is this stuff when it goes critical, as it will just before detonation—but not yet.”

The pair of headlights from the Mini took a lot of stripping. Vassiliev took out the glass lamps, the filament inside, and the inner reflector bowl. What he was left with was a pair of extremely heavy semispherical bowls, each of one-inch-thick hardened steel. Each bowl had a flange around its rim, drilled with sixteen holes to take the nuts and bolts. Joined together, they would form a perfect globe.

One of the bowls had at its base a two-inch-wide hole, threaded inside to accept the steel plug from Lichka’s left shoe. The other had a short stump of tube sticking out from its base; internally it was two inches wide, and it was flanged and threaded on its outer side to screw into the steel “gun” tube from the Hanomag’s exhaust system.

The last item was the child’s ball, brought in by the camper van. Vassiliev cut away the bright rubberized skin. A ball of metal gleamed in the light.

“That’s lead wrapping,” he said. “The ball of uranium, the fissionable core of the nuke, is inside. I’ll get it out later. It’s also radioactive, like that piece over there.”

Having satisfied himself he had his nine components, he started work on the steel cabinet. Turning it on its back, he lifted the lid and with the wooden laths and rods prepared an inner frame in the form of a low cradle, which rested on the floor of the cabinet. This he covered with a thick layer of shock-absorbent foam rubber.

“I’ll pack more around the sides and over the top when the bomb’s inside,” he explained.

Taking the four batteries, he wired them up, terminal to terminal, then lashed them into a block with masking tape. Finally he bored four small holes in the lid of the cabinet and wired the block of batteries inside. It was now midday.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s put the device together. By the way, have you ever seen a nuke?”

“No,” said Petrofsky hoarsely. He was an expert in unarmed combat, unafraid of fists, knives, or guns. But the cold-blooded joviality of Vassiliev as he handled enough destructive power to flatten a town worried him. Like most people, Petrofsky regarded nuclear science as an occult art.

“Once they were very complicated,” said the assembler. “Very large, even the low-yield ones, and could be made only under extremely complex laboratory conditions. Today the really sophisticated ones, the multimegaton hydrogen weapons, still are. But the basic atomic bomb today has been simplified to a point where it can be assembled on just about any workbench—given the right parts, of course, and a bit of caution and know-how.”

“Great,” said Petrofsky. Vassiliev was cutting away the thin lead sheeting around the ball of uranium-235. The lead had been wrapped around cold, like wrapping paper, and its seams sealed with a blowtorch. It came apart quite easily. Inside was the inner ball, five inches in diameter, with a two-inch-wide hole drilled straight through the middle.

“Want to know how it works?” asked Vassiliev.

“Sure.”

“This ball is uranium. Weight, fifteen and a half kilograms. Not enough mass to have reached criticality. Uranium goes critical as its mass increases beyond criticality point.”

“What do you mean, ‘goes critical’?”

“It starts to fizz. Not literally, like soda. I mean fizz in radioactive terms. It passes to the threshold of detonation. This ball is not yet at that stage. See that short rod over there?”