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Former RAF pilot and investigative journalist, Frederick Forsyth defined the modern thriller when he wrote The Day of The Jackal, with its lightning-paced storytelling, effortlessly cool reality and unique insider information. Since then he has written eleven further bestselling novels. He lives in England.

About the Book

Plan Aurora, hatched in a remote dacha in the forest outside Moscow and initiated with relentless brilliance and skill, is a plan within a plan that, in its spine-chilling ingenuity, breaches the ultra-secret Fourth Protocol and turns the fears that shaped it into a living nightmare.

A crack Soviet agent, placed undercover in a quiet English country town, begins to assemble a jigsaw of devastation. MI5 investigator John Preston, working against the most urgent of deadlines, leads an operation to prevent the act of murderous destruction aimed at tumbling Britain into revolution...

Epilogue

SIR BERNARD HEMMINGS formally retired on 1 September 1987, although he had been on leave since mid-July. He died in November that year, his pension rights assured to the benefit of his wife and step-daughter.

Brian Harcourt-Smith did not succeed him as Director-General. The Wise Men took their soundings and though it was agreed there was nothing in the least sinister in Harcourt-Smith’s attempts to pass the Preston Report no farther, or to discount the significance of the Glasgow intercept, it could not be avoided that these constituted two serious errors of judgement. There being no other discernible successor inside ‘Five’, a man was brought in from outside as Director-General. Mr Harcourt-Smith resigned some months later and joined the board of a merchant bank in the City.

John Preston retired in early September and joined the staff of the asset-protection people. His salary was more than doubled, enabling him to seek his divorce and make a strong case for the custody of his son Tommy, whose welfare and education he could now guarantee. Julia abruptly withdrew her objection and the custody was granted.

Sir Nigel Irvine retired, as scheduled, on the last day of the year, departing his office in time for Christmas. He went to live at his cottage at Langton Matravers where he joined fully in the life of the village and told anyone who asked that, prior to retirement, he had done ‘something boring in Whitehall’.

Jan Marais was summoned to Pretoria in early December for consultations. As the Boeing 747 of South African Airlines lifted off from Heathrow, two burly NIS agents emerged from the flight-crew rest area and put handcuffs on him. He did not enjoy his retirement, the whole of which was spent several feet below ground level assisting teams of large gentlemen with their enquiries.

The arrest of Marais having taken place in public, news of it soon leaked out, which alerted General Karpov that his sleeper had been burned. He was confident Marais, alias Frikki Brandt, would not long resist the interrogators, and waited for the arrest of George Berenson and the consequent dismay in the Western Alliance.

In mid-December Berenson took early retirement from the Ministry, but there was no arrest. After the personal intervention of Sir Nigel Irvine, the man was allowed to retire to the British Virgin Islands on a small but adequate pension from his wife.

The news told General Karpov that his top agent had not only been blown, but turned as well. What he did not know was just when Berenson had been turned to the service of the British. Then, from inside his own rezidentura in London, KGB agent Andreyev reported he had heard a rumour to the effect Berenson had turned to MI5 from the very first approach Jan Marais had ever made to him.

Within a week the analysts at Yasyenevo had to accept that three years of what was actually perfectly good intelligence would have to be junked as suspect from the start.

The Fourth Protocol

Frederick Forsyth

THE MAN IN grey decided to take the Glen suite of diamonds at midnight. Provided they were still in the apartment safe and the occupants away. This he needed to know. So he watched and he waited. At half past seven he was rewarded.

The big, wide limousine swooped up from the subterranean car park with the powerful grace implied by its name. It paused for an instant in the mouth of the cavern as its driver checked the street for traffic, then turned into the road and headed towards Hyde Park Corner.

Sitting across from the luxury apartment block, dressed in a hired chauffeur’s uniform at the wheel of the rented Volvo estate, Jim Rawlings breathed a sigh of relief. Gazing unobserved across the Belgravia street he had seen what he had hoped for: the husband had been at the wheel with his wife beside him. He already had the engine running and the heater on to keep out the cold. Moving the automatic shift into drive, he eased out of the line of parked cars and went after the Daimler-Jaguar.

It was a crisp and bright morning, with a pale wash of light over Green Park in the east and the street lights still on. Rawlings had been at the stakeout since five o’clock and although a few people had passed down the street no-one had taken any notice of him. A chauffeur in a big car in Belgravia, richest of London’s West End districts, attracts no attention, least of all with four suitcases and a hamper in the back, on the morning of 31 December. Many of the rich would be preparing to leave the capital to celebrate the festivities at their country homes.

He was fifty yards behind the Jaguar at Hyde Park Corner, allowing a truck to move between them. Up Park Lane Rawlings had one momentary misgiving: there was a branch of Coutts Bank there and he feared the couple in the Jaguar might pause to drop the diamonds into the night safe.

At Marble Arch he breathed a second sigh of relief. The limousine ahead of him made no turn around the arch to take the southbound carriageway back down Park Lane towards the bank. It sped straight up Great Cumberland Place, joined Gloucester Place and kept on north. So, the occupants of the luxury apartment on the eighth floor of Fontenoy House were not leaving the items with Coutts; either they had them in the car and were taking them to the country, or they were leaving them for the New Year period in the apartment. Rawlings was confident it would be the latter.

He tailed the Jaguar to Hendon, watched it speeding into the last mile before the M1 motorway and then turned back towards central London. Evidently, as he had hoped, they were going to join the wife’s brother, the Duke of Sheffield, at his estates in North Yorkshire, a full six-hour drive away. That would give him a minimum of twenty-four hours, more than he needed. He had no doubts he could ‘take’ the apartment at Fontenoy House; he was, after all, one of the best cracksmen in London.

By mid-morning he had returned the Volvo to the rental company, the uniform to the costumiers, and the empty suitcases to the cupboard. He was back in his top-floor flat, a comfortable and expensively furnished pad atop a converted tea warehouse in his native Wandsworth. However he prospered, he was a south Londoner, born and bred, and though Wandsworth might not be as chic as Belgravia or Mayfair, it was his ‘manor’. Like all of his kind, he hated to leave the security of his own manor. Within it he felt reasonably safe, even though to the local underworld and the police he was known as a ‘face’, underworld slang for a criminal or villain.

Like all successful villains, he kept a low profile around the manor, driving an unobtrusive car, his sole indulgence being the elegance of his apartment. He cultivated a deliberate vagueness among the lower orders of the underworld as to exactly what he did, and although the police accurately suspected his speciality, his ‘form book’ was clean, apart from a short stretch of porridge as a teenager. His evident success and the vagueness about how he achieved it evoked reverence among the young aspirants in the game, who were happy to perform small errands for him. Even the heavy mobs who took out wage offices in broad daylight with shotguns and pickaxe handles left him alone.

As was necessary, he had to have a ‘front’ occupation to account for the money. All the successful ‘faces’ had some form of legitimate business. The favoured ones have always been minicab driving or owning greengrocer shops, or a scrap metal and general dealership. All these fronts permit a lot of hidden profits, cash dealing, spare time, a range of hiding places and the facility to employ a couple of ‘heavies’ or ‘slags’. These are hard men of little brain but considerable strength who also need an apparently legitimate employment to supplement their habitual profession as muscle hire.

Rawlings in fact had a scrap-metal dealership and car-wrecking yard. It gave him access to a well-equipped machine workshop, metal of all kinds, electrical wiring, battery acid and the two big thugs he employed both in the yard and as backup should he ever run into any aggro from villains who might decide to make trouble for him.

Showered and shaved, Rawlings stirred demerara crystals into his second espresso of the morning and studied again the sketch drawings Billy Rice had left him.

Billy was his apprentice, a smart twenty-three-year-old who would one day become good, even very good. He was still starting out on the fringe of the underworld and eager to do favours for a man of prestige, apart from the invaluable instructions he would get in the process. Twenty-four hours earlier Billy had knocked at the door of the eighth-floor apartment of Fontenoy House, dressed in the livery of an expensive flower shop and carrying a large bouquet of flowers. The props had got him effortlessly past the commissionaire in the lobby, where he had also noted the exact layout of the entrance hall, the porter’s lodge and the way to the stairs.

It was her ladyship who had answered the door personally, her face lighting up with surprise and pleasure at the sight of the flowers. They purported to come from the committee of the Distressed Veterans Benevolent Fund, of which Lady Fiona was one of the patronesses and whose gala ball she was due to attend that very night, 30 December 1986. Rawlings figured that even if, at the ball itself, she mentioned the bouquet to any one of the committee members, he would simply assume it had been sent by another member on behalf of them all.

At the door she had examined the attached card, exclaimed, ‘Oh, how perfectly lovely,’ in the bright cut-crystal accents of her class, and taken the bouquet. Then Billy had held out his receipt pad and ballpoint pen. Unable to manage all three items together, Lady Fiona had withdrawn flustered into the sitting-room to put down the bouquet, leaving Billy unattended for several seconds in the small hallway.

With his boyish looks, fluffy blond hair, blue eyes and shy smile, Billy was a gift. He reckoned he could work his way past any middle-aged housewife in the metropolis. But his baby blue eyes missed very little.

Before even pressing the doorbell, he had spent a full minute scanning the outside of the door, its frame and surrounding wall area in the passage. He was looking for a small buzzer no larger than a walnut, or a black button or switch with which to turn the buzzer off. Only when satisfied there was none did he ring the bell.

Left alone in the doorway, he did the same again, searching the inner side of the frame and the walls for buzzer or switch. Again there was none. By the time the lady of the house returned to the hall to sign the receipt, Billy knew the door was secured by a shunt lock, which he had gratefully identified as a Chubb rather than a Bramah, which is reputedly unpickable.

Lady Fiona took the pad and pen and tried to sign for the flowers. No chance. The ballpoint pen had long had its cartridge removed and any remaining ink expended on a blank piece of paper. Billy apologized profusely. With a bright smile, Lady Fiona told him it was of no account, she was sure she had one in her bag, and returned beyond the sitting-room door. Billy had already noted what he sought. The door was indeed linked to an alarm system.

Protruding from the edge of the open door, high up on the hinge side, was a small plunger contact. Opposite it, set in the door jamb, was a tiny socket. Inside that socket, he knew, would be a Pye microswitch. With the door in the closed position the plunger would enter the socket and make a contact.

With the burglar alarm set and activated, the microswitch would trigger the alarm if the contact were broken, that is, if the door were opened. It took Billy less than three seconds to bring out his tube of superglue, squirt a hefty dollop into the orifice containing the microswitch and tamp the whole thing down with a small ball of plasticine and glue compound. In four seconds more it was rock hard, the microswitch blanked off from the entering plunger in the edge of the door.

When Lady Fiona returned with the signed receipt she found the nice young man leaning against the door jamb, from which he straightened up with an apologetic smile, smearing any surplus from the ball of his thumb as he did so. Later, Billy had given Jim Rawlings a complete description of the layout of the entrance, porter’s lodge, location of the stairs and elevators, the passage to the apartment door, the small hallway behind the door and what part of the sitting-room he had been able to see.

As he sipped his coffee Rawlings was confident that four hours earlier the apartment owner had carried his suitcases into the corridor and returned to his own hallway to set his alarm. As usual it had made no sound. Closing the front door after him, he would have turned the key fully in the mortise lock, satisfied his alarm was now set and activated. Normally, the plunger would have been in contact with the Pye microswitch. The turning of the key would have established the complete link, activating the whole system. But with the plunger blanked off from the microswitch, the door system at least would be inert. Rawlings was certain he could take that door lock inside thirty minutes. In the apartment itself there would be other traps. He would cope with those when he met them.

Finishing his coffee, he reached for his file of newspaper cuttings. Like all jewel thieves, Rawlings followed the society gossip columns closely. This particular file was entirely about the social appearances of Lady Fiona and the suite of perfect diamonds she had worn to the gala ball the previous evening, so far as Jim Rawlings was concerned, for the last time.

A thousand miles to the east the old man standing at the window of the sitting-room in the third-floor front apartment at Prospekt Mira 111 was also thinking of midnight. It would herald 1 January 1987, his seventy-fifth birthday.

The hour was well past midday but he was still in a robe; there was little enough cause these days to rise early or spruce up to go to the office. There was no office to go to. His Russian wife Erita, thirty years his junior, had taken their two boys skating along the flooded and frozen lanes of Gorki Park, so he was alone.

He caught a glance of himself in a wall mirror and the prospect brought him no more joy than to contemplate his life, or what was left of it. The face, always lined, was now deeply furrowed. The hair, once thick and dark, was now snow white, skimpy and lifeless. The skin, after a lifetime of titanic drinking and chain-smoking, was blotched and mottled. The eyes gazed back miserably. He returned to the window and looked down at the snow-choked street. A few muffled, huddled babushkas were sweeping away the snow, which would fall again tonight.

It had been so long, he mused, twenty-four years almost to the day, since he had quit his non-job and pointless exile in Beirut to come here. There had been no point in staying, Nick Elliot and the rest at the Firm had got it all together by then; he had finally admitted it to them himself. So he had come, leaving wife and children to join him later if they wished.

At first he thought it was like coming home, to a spiritual and moral home. He had thrown himself into the new life, he had truly believed in the philosophy and its eventual triumph. Why not? He had spent twenty-seven years serving it. He had been happy and fulfilled those first, early years of the mid-sixties. There had been the extensive debriefing, of course, but he had been revered within the Committee of State Security. He was, after all, one of the Five Stars, the greatest of them all, with Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Blake, the ones who had burrowed into the inner core of the British establishment and betrayed it all.

Burgess, drinking and buggering his way to an early grave, had been in it before he had arrived. Maclean had lost his illusions first, but then he had been in Moscow since 1951. By 1963 he was sour and embittered, taking it out on Melinda, who had finally quit to come here, to this apartment. Maclean had gone on, somehow, utterly disillusioned and resentful, until the cancer got him, by which time he hated his hosts and they hated him. Blunt had been blown and disgraced back in England. That left him and Blake, the old man thought. In a way he envied Blake, completely assimilated, utterly content, who had invited him and Erita round for New Year’s Eve. Of course, Blake had had a cosmopolitan background, Dutch father, Jewish mother.

For him personally there could be no assimilation; he had known that after the first five years. By then he had learned fluent Russian, written and spoken, but he still retained a remarkable English accent. Apart from that, he had come to hate the society. It was a completely, irreversible and unalterably alien society.

That was not the worst of it: within seven years of arriving he had lost his last political illusions. It was all a lie, and he had been smart enough to see through it. He had spent his youth and manhood serving a lie, lying for the lie, betraying for the lie, abandoning that ‘green and pleasant land’, and all for a lie.

For years, provided as of right with every British magazine and newspaper, he had followed the cricket scores while advising on the inspiration of strikes, looked at the old familiar places in the magazines while preparing disinformation aimed at bringing it all to ruin, perched unobserved on a barstool in the National to listen to the Brits laughing and joking in his language, while counselling the top men of the KGB, including even the Chairman himself, on how best to subvert that little island. And all the time, deep inside, these past fifteen years, there had been a great void of despair that not even the drink and the many women had been able to blank out. It was too late; he could never go back, he told himself. And yet, and yet . . .

The doorbell rang. It puzzled him. Prospekt Mira 111 is a totally KGB-owned block in a quiet back street of central Moscow, with mainly senior KGB tenants and a few Foreign Ministry people. A visitor would have to check in with the concierge. It could not be Erita – she had her own key.

When he opened the door a man stood there alone. He was youthful and looked fit, sheathed in a well-cut greatcoat and with a warm fur shapka, without insignia, on his head. His face was coldly impassive, but not from the freezing wind outside, for his shoes indicated he had stepped from a warm car into a warm apartment block, not trudged through icy snow. Blank blue eyes stared at the old man with neither friendship nor hostility.

Philby was surprised. Close personal friends, the Blakes and half a dozen others, called him Kim. For the rest, he had lived under a pseudonym for many, many years. Only to a few at the very top was he Philby, a full KGB colonel on the retired list.

‘I am Major Pavlov, of the Ninth Directorate, attached to the personal staff of the General Secretary of the CPSU.’

Philby knew the Ninth Directorate of the KGB. It provided the bodyguards for all the top Party personnel and the buildings in which they worked and lived. In uniform, nowadays confined to inside the Party buildings and for ceremonial occasions, they would wear the distinctive electric-blue cap bands, shoulder boards and lapel tabs, and be also known as the Kremlin Guards. Attached as personal bodyguards, they would wear beautifully cut civilian clothes; they would also be utterly fit, highly trained, icily loyal, and armed.

‘This also,’ said Major Pavlov and held out a small square of pasteboard with a phone number on it.

‘Thank you,’ said Philby. Without a further word the major inclined his head briefly, turned on his heel and went back down the corridor. Seconds later, from his window, Philby watched the sleek black Chaika limousine with its distinctive Central Committee number plates, beginning with the letters MOC, slide away from the front entrance.

Jim Rawlings peered down at the society magazine photograph through a magnifying glass. The picture showed the woman he had seen driving north out of London that morning with her husband, albeit taken a year earlier. She was standing in a presentation line while the woman next to her greeted Princess Alexandra. And she was wearing the stones. Rawlings, who studied for months before he made a hit, knew their provenance better than his own birth date.

In 1905 the young Earl of Margate had returned from South Africa bearing with him four magnificent but uncut stones. On his marriage in 1912 he had had Cartier of London cut and set the stones as a present to his young wife. Cartier had them cut by Aascher’s of Amsterdam, still then regarded as the finest cutters in the world following their triumph in the cutting of the massive Cullinan stone. The four original gems emerged as two matching pairs of pear-shaped fifty-eight-facet stones, one pair weighing in at ten carats each, the other pair at twenty carats each.

Back in London Cartier had set these stones in white gold, surrounded by a total of forty much smaller stones, to create a suite composed of a tiara with as its centrepiece one of the larger of the pear-shaped gems, a pendant with the other as its centrepiece, and two matching pendant earrings with the two smaller stones. Before they were ready the Earl’s father, the seventh Duke of Sheffield, died and the Earl succeeded to the title. The diamonds became known as the Glen Diamonds, after the family name of the House of Sheffield.

The eighth Duke had passed them on his death in 1936 to his son and he in turn had had two children, a daughter born in 1944 and a son born in 1949. It was this daughter, now aged forty-two, whose image was beneath Jim Rawlings’s magnifying glass.

‘You won’t be wearing them again, darling,’ said Rawlings to himself. Then he began checking once again his equipment for the evening.

Harold Philby slit the envelope with a kitchen knife, extracted the letter and spread it on the sitting-room table. He was impressed; it was from the General Secretary of the CPSU personally, handwritten in the Soviet leader’s neat, clerkish script and, of course, in Russian.

The paper was of fine quality like the matching envelope, and unheaded. He must have written it from his personal apartment in number 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt, the huge block which since the time of Stalin had contained in its sumptuous quarters the Moscow homes of the very top level of the Party hierarchs.

In the top right-hand corner were the words: ‘A.m. Wednesday, 31 December 1986’. The text came below. It read:

Dear Philby,

My attention has been drawn to a remark made by you at a recent dinner party in Moscow. To wit, that ‘the political stability of Great Britain is constantly overestimated here in Moscow and never more so than at the present time’.

I would be happy to receive from you an expansion and clarification of this remark. Put this explanation in written form and direct it to me personally, without retaining any copies or using secretaries.

When it is ready call the number Major Pavlov has given you, ask to speak to him personally, and he will come to your residence to collect it.

My felicitations upon your birthday tomorrow.

Sincerely . . .

Philby let out his breath slowly. So, Kryuchkov’s dinner on the 26th for senior officers of the KGB had been bugged after all. He had half suspected it. As First Deputy Chairman of the KGB and head of its First Chief Directorate, Vladimir Alexandrovitch Kryuchkov was the General Secretary’s creature, body and soul. Although styled a Colonel-General, Kryuchkov was no military man nor even a professional intelligence officer; he was a Party apparatchik to his bootstraps, one of those brought in by the present Soviet leader when he had been Chairman of the KGB.

Philby read the letter again, then pushed it away from him. The old man’s style hadn’t changed, he thought. Brief to the point of starkness, clear and concise, devoid of elaborate courtesies, inviting no contradiction. Even the reference to Philby’s birthday was brief enough simply to show he had called for the file and little more.

Still, Philby was impressed. A personal letter from this most glacial and remote of men was unusual and would have had many men trembling at the honour. Years ago it had been different. When the present Soviet leader had arrived at the KGB as Chairman, Philby had already been there for years and was considered something of a star. He lectured on the Western intelligence agencies in general and on the British SIS in particular.

Like all incoming Party men set to command professionals of another discipline the new Chairman had looked to put his own placemen in key posts. Philby, even though respected and admired as one of the Five Stars, realized that a patron in very high places would be useful in this most conspiratorial of societies. The Chairman, a highly intelligent and cultured man, had shown a curiosity, short of fascination but above mere interest, in Britain.

Many times, over those years, he had asked Philby for an interpretation or analysis of events in Britain, its personalities and likely reactions, and Philby had been happy to oblige. It was as if the KGB Chairman wanted to check what reached his desk from the in-house ‘Britain’ experts and from those at his old office, the International Department of the Central Committee under Boris Ponomarev, against another critique. Several times he had heeded Philby’s quiet advice on matters pertaining to Britain.

It had been some time since Philby had seen the new czar of all the Russias face to face. That was when he had attended a reception to mark the Chairman’s departure from the KGB back to the Central Committee, apparently as a Secretary, in fact to prepare for his predecessor’s coming death and to mastermind his own advancement. And now he was seeking Philby’s interpretation again.

His reverie was interrupted by the return of Erita and the boys, flushed from skating and noisy as ever. Back in 1975, long after Melinda Maclean’s departure, when the higher-ups at the KGB had decided his desultory whoring and drinking had lost their charms (for the apparat, at least), Erita had been ordered to move in with him. She was a KGB girl then, unusually also Jewish, aged thirty-four, dark and solid. They had married the same year.

After the marriage his notable personal charm had taken its toll. She had genuinely fallen in love with him and had roundly refused to report on him any more to the KGB. The case officer had shrugged, reported back and been told to drop the matter. The boys had come two and three years later.

‘Anything important, Kim?’ she asked, as he stood and pushed the letter into his pocket. He shook his head. She went on pulling the thick, quilted jackets off the boys.

But she could see he was absorbed by something. She knew better than to insist, but she came over and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Please don’t drink too much at the Blakes’ tonight.’

In fact he was going to permit himself one last bender. A lifelong toper who, when he started drinking at a party, would usually go on until he collapsed, he had ignored a hundred doctors’ warnings to quit. They had forced him to stop the cigarettes, and that had been bad enough. But not the booze; he could still quit it when he wanted and he knew that he would have to stop for a while after this evening’s party.

He recalled the remark he had made at Kryuchkov’s dinner table and the thoughts that had prompted it. He knew what was going on, and what was intended, deep inside the heart of Britain’s Labour Party. Others had received the mass of raw intelligence that he had studied over the years, and which was still passed to him as a sort of favour. But only he had been able to put all the pieces together, assembling them within the framework of British mass psychology, to come up with the real picture. If he was going to do justice to the idea forming in his mind, he was going to have to describe that picture in words; prepare for the Soviet leader one of the best pieces he had ever penned. At the weekend he could send Erita and the boys to the dacha. He would start, alone in the apartment, at the weekend. Before then, one last bender.

Jim Rawlings spent the hour between nine and ten that night sitting in another, smaller rented car outside Fontenoy House. He was dressed in a beautifully cut dinner jacket and attracted no attention. What he was studying was the pattern of lights high up in the apartment block. The flat he had targeted was, of course, in darkness, but he was happy to see that lights were on in the apartments above and below it. In each, to judge from the appearances of guests at the windows, New Year parties were getting under way.

At ten, with his car parked discreetly in a side street two blocks away, he sauntered into the front entrance of Fontenoy House. There had been so many people going in and out that the doors were closed but not locked. Inside the lobby, on the left-hand side, was the porter’s lodge, just as Billy Rice had said. Inside it the night porter was watching his Japanese portable. He rose and came to his doorway, as if to speak.

Rawlings was carrying a bottle of champagne decorated with a huge ribbon bow. He waved a hand in tipsy greeting. ‘Evening,’ he called, and added, ‘Oh, and Happy New Year.’

If the old porter was thinking of asking for identification or destination, he thought better of it. There were at least six parties going on in the block. Half of them seemed to be open house, so how was he to check guest lists?

‘Oh, er, thank you, sir. Happy New Year, sir,’ he called, but the dinner-jacketed back had gone down the corridor. He returned to his movie.

Rawlings used the stairs to the first floor, then the lift to the eighth. At five past ten he was outside the door of the apartment he sought. As Billy had reported, there was no buzzer and the lock was a Chubb mortise. There was a secondary, self-closing Yale lock twenty inches above the Chubb for everyday use.

The Chubb mortise has a total of 17,000 computations and permutations. It is a five-lever lock but for a good keyman not an insuperable problem, since only the first two and a half levers need to be ascertained; the other two and a half are the same, but in reverse, so that the owner’s key will operate equally well when introduced from the other side of the door.

After leaving school at sixteen, Rawlings had spent ten years working with and under his Uncle Albert in the latter’s hardware shop. It was a good front for the old man, himself a notable cracksman in his day. It gave the eager young Rawlings access to every known lock on the market and most of the smaller safes. After ten years of endless practice and with Uncle Albert’s expert coaching, Rawlings could take just about any lock in manufacture.

From his trouser pocket he produced a ring of twelve skeleton keys, all made up in his own workshop. He selected and tested three, one after the other, and settled for the sixth on the ring. Inserting it into the Chubb, he began to detect the pressure points inside the lock. Then, using a flat pack of slim steel files from his top pocket he started to work on the softer metal of the skeleton. Within ten minutes he had the first two and a half levers, the configuration or ‘profile’ that he needed. In another fifteen minutes he had reproduced the same two and a half lever pattern in reverse. Inserting the finished skeleton into the Chubb lock, he turned it slowly and carefully.

It went fully back. He waited for sixty seconds, just in case Billy’s tamp of plasticine and super-glue compound had not held inside the door jamb. No bells. He let out a sigh and went to work on the Yale with a fine steel spike. That took sixty seconds and the door swung quietly open. It was dark inside, but the light from the corridor gave him the outlines of the empty hallway. It was about eight feet square and carpeted.

He suspected there would be a pressure pad somewhere, but not too close to the door, lest the owner should trigger it himself. Stepping into the hall, close to the wall, he eased the door closed behind him and put on the hall light. To his left was a door, partly open, through which he could see a lavatory. To his right, another door, almost certainly the cloaks cupboard containing the alarm control system, which he would leave alone. Taking a pair of pliers from his breast pocket, he stooped and lifted the carpet from its smooth-edge beading. As the square of carpet rose he spotted the pressure pad in the dead centre of the hall. Just the one. Letting the carpet gently back in place, he stepped around it and opened the large door ahead of him. As Billy had said, it was the door to the sitting-room.

He stood for several minutes on the threshold of the sitting-room before identifying the light switch and putting on the lights. It was a risk, but he was eight floors above the street, the owners were in Yorkshire and he did not have the time to work in a booby-trapped room by pencil torch.

The room was oblong, about twenty-five feet by eighteen, carpeted and richly furnished. Ahead of him were the double-glazed picture windows facing south and over the street. To his right was a wall containing a stone fireplace and gas-log fire with, in one corner, a door presumably leading to the master bedroom suite. To his left, the opposite wall contained two doors, one open to the passage leading to the guest bedrooms, the other closed, perhaps to the dining-room and kitchen.

He spent another ten minutes standing motionless scanning the walls and ceiling. His reason was simple: there could well be a static movement alarm that Billy Rice had not seen, but which would detect any body heat or movement entering the room. If bells went off, he could be out of there in three seconds. There were no bells; the system was based on a wired-up door, probably windows which he did not intend to touch anyway, and a system of pressure pads.

The safe, he was sure, would be in this room or the master bedroom, and it would be on an outside wall, since interior walls would not be thick enough. He spotted it just before eleven o’clock. Right in front of him, in an eight-foot piece of wall between the two wide windows, was a gilt-framed mirror, not hanging slightly away from the wall like the pictures, casting a narrow shadow at the edge, but too flat to the wall, as if hinged.

Using his pliers to lift the edge of the carpet, he worked his way round the walls, unveiling the thread-like wires leading from the skirting board to the pads, somewhere out towards the centre of the room.

When he reached the mirror he saw there was one pressure pad directly beneath it. He thought of moving it, but instead lifted a large, low coffee table from nearby and placed it over the pad, its legs clear of the edges. He now knew that if he stayed close to the walls, or stood on pieces of furniture (no furniture can stand on a pressure pad) he would be safe.

The mirror was kept close to the wall by magnetic catch, also wired up. That was no problem. He slipped a flat wafer of magnetized steel between the two magnets of the catch, one in the mirror frame and the other in the wall. Keeping his substitute flat to the wall-based magnet, he eased the mirror away from the wall. The wall magnet made no protest; it was still in contact with another magnet, so it did not report that any contact had been broken.

Rawlings smiled. The wall safe was a nice little Hamber Model D. He knew the door was made of half-inch-thick, high-tensile, hardened steel: the hinge was a vertical rod of hardened steel, going into the frame upwards and downwards from the door itself. The securing mechanism consisted of three hardened-steel bolts emerging from the door and entering the frame to a depth of 1½ inches. Behind the steel face of the door was a 2-inch-deep tinplate box containing the three locking bolts, the vertical control bolt that governed their movements and the three-wheel combination lock whose face was now staring at him.

Rawlings did not intend to tamper with any of this. There was an easier way – to cut the door from top to bottom just on the hinge side of the combination dial. That would leave 60 per cent of the door, containing the combination lock and three locking bolts, jammed into the safe’s door frame. The other 40 per cent of the door would swing open, giving him enough space to get his hand inside and the contents out.

He worked his way back to the hall, where he had left his bottle of champagne, and returned with it. Squatting on the coffee table, he unscrewed the bottom of the false bottle and emptied out his supplies. Apart from an electric detonator, ensconced in cotton wool in a small box, a collection of small magnets and a reel of ordinary household 5-amp flex, he had brought a length of CLC.

Rawlings knew the best way to cut half-inch steel plate was to use the Monroe theory, named after the inventor of the ‘shaped charge’ principle. What he was holding was called in the trade Charge-Linear-Cutting, or CLC; a V-shaped length of metal, stiff but just pliable, encased in plastic explosive. It was manufactured by three companies in Britain, one government-owned and the other two in the private sector. CLC was definitely not available except under stringent licence, but as a professional cracksman Rawlings had a contact, a bent employee in one of the private-sector companies.

Quick and expertly, Rawlings prepared the length he needed and applied it to the outside of the Hamber’s door, from top to bottom, just one side of the combination dial. Into one end of the CLC he inserted the detonator, from which protruded two twisted copper wires. These he untwisted and separated widely, to prevent a short-circuit later. To each wire he attached one of the strands from his domestic flex, which itself terminated in a three-pin domestic plug.

Unravelling this carefully, he worked his way backwards round the room and into the corridor leading to the guest bedrooms. The lee of the passage would give him protection from the blast. Making his way gingerly to the kitchen, he filled with water a large polythene bag from his pocket. This he fixed to the wall with thumb tacks to hang over the explosive on the safe’s door. Feather cushions, Uncle Albert had told him, are for the birds and TV. There is no shock absorber like water.

It was twenty to midnight. Above him the party was getting noisier and noisier. Even in this luxury block with its accent on privacy he could clearly hear the shouting and dancing. His last act before retiring to the corridor was to turn on the television set. Inside the corridor he located a wall plug, made sure the switch was off and plugged in his flex. Then he waited.

By one minute to midnight the noise above was horrendous. Then suddenly it quietened as somebody roared for silence. In the quiet Rawlings could hear the television he had switched on in the sitting-room. The traditional Scottish programme, with its ballads and Highland dancing changed to a static image of the clock mistakenly called Big Ben atop London’s Houses of Parliament. Behind the clock’s facade was the giant bell, the real Big Ben. The TV commentator chattered away the seconds to midnight as people across the kingdom charged their glasses. Then the quarters began to sound.

After the quarters there was a pause. Then Big Ben spoke: BONG, the thunderous boom of the first stroke of midnight. It echoed in twenty million homes across the land; it crashed through the apartment on the ninth floor of Fontenoy House and was itself eclipsed by the roar of cheering and ‘Auld Lang Syne’. As the first boom rang out on the eighth floor, Jim Rawlings flicked the electric switch to ‘on’.

The flat crack went unnoticed, save by himself. He waited sixty seconds, then unplugged his lead and began to work his way back to the safe, tidying up his gear as he went. The plumes of smoke were clearing. Of the plastic cushion and its gallon of water there was nothing left but a few damp patches. The door of the safe looked as if it had been cleft from top to bottom by a blunt axe wielded by a giant. Rawlings blew away a few plumes of smoke and with gloved hand pulled the smaller part of the door back on its hinges. The tinplate box had been torn apart by the blast, but all the bolts in the other section of the door were in their sockets. The part he had opened was large enough for him to peer inside. A cash box and a velvet bag; he eased out the bag, undid the drawstring and emptied the contents on to the coffee table.

They glittered and flared in the light, as if they contained their own fire. The Glen Diamonds. Rawlings put the remainder of his equipment back in the false champagne bottle, the flex, the empty detonator box, the thumb tacks and remainder of the CLC, before he realized he had an unforeseen problem. The pendant and earrings would slip into his trouser pockets, but the tiara was wider and higher than he had thought. He glanced round for a receptacle that would attract no attention. It was lying on top of the bureau a few feet away.

He emptied the contents of the attaché case into the bowl of an armchair – a collection of wallets, credit cards, pens, address books and a couple of folders.

It was exactly right. The case took all the Glen suite and the champagne bottle, which might have seemed odd if seen leaving a party. With a last glance around the sitting-room, Rawlings switched off the light, stepped back into the hall and closed the door. Once in the corridor he relocked the main door with the Chubb lock and sixty seconds later strolled past the porter’s lodge and out into the night. The man did not even look up.

It was nearly midnight that first day of January when Harold Philby sat down at the sitting-room table in his Moscow flat. He had had his bender the previous evening at the Blakes’ party, but had not even enjoyed it. His thoughts were too locked into what he would have to write. During the morning he had recovered from the inevitable hangover and now, with Erita and the boys in bed asleep, he had the peace and quiet to try to think things out.

There was a ‘coo’ from across the room; Philby rose and went over to the large cage in the corner and gazed through the bars at a pigeon with one leg in splints. He had always adored pets, from his vixen in Beirut through a range of canaries and parakeets in this very apartment. The pigeon waddled across the floor of its cage, the splinted leg impeding its passage.

‘All right, old fellow,’ said Philby through the bars, ‘we’ll have them off soon and you can fly again.’

He returned to the table. It had got to be good, he told himself for the hundredth time. The General Secretary was a bad man to cross and a hard one to deceive. Some of those senior Air Force men who had made such a dog’s breakfast of the tracking and downing of the Korean jet-liner back in 1983 had, on his personal recommendation, ended up in cold graves beneath the permafrost of the Kamchatka. Wracked by health problems, confined to a wheelchair part of the time he might be, but he was still the undisputed master of the USSR, his word was law, his brain was still razor sharp and his pale eyes missed nothing.

Taking paper and pencil, Philby began to rough out the first draft of his reply.

Four hours later, but at the same period just before midnight in London, the owner of the apartment at Fontenoy House returned alone to the capital. A tall, greying and distinguished man in his mid-fifties, he drove straight into the basement car park using his own plastic admission card and took his own suitcase in the elevator to the eighth floor. He was in a foul mood.

He had driven for six hours, having left his brother-in-law’s stately home three days prematurely following a blazing row with his wife. She, angular and horsy, adored the countryside as much as he loathed it. Content to stride the bleak Yorkshire moors in mid-winter, she had left him miserably cooped up indoors with her brother, the tenth Duke. Which was in a way worse, for the apartment owner, who prided himself on his appreciation of the manly virtues was convinced the wretched fellow was gay.

The New Year’s Eve dinner had been appalling for him, surrounded as he was by his wife’s cronies who talked hunting, shooting and fishing the entire time, the whole being punctured by the high, wittering laugh of the Duke and his too handsome pals. That morning he had made some remark to his wife and she had gone off the deep end. The result was, it had been agreed he could drive south alone after tea; she would remain as long as she wished, which might be a month.

He entered the hall of his apartment and paused; the alarm system should be emitting a loud, repeated ‘peep’ which should last for thirty seconds before the full alarm sounded, during which time he could reach the master box and turn it off. Damn thing, he thought, probably out of order. He went into the cloaks cupboard and turned the whole system off with his personal key. Then he entered the sitting-room and threw on the light.

He stood, with his bag behind him in the hall, and stared at the scene in open-mouthed horror. The damp patches had evaporated in the warmth, and the television was not on. What caught his eye at once was the scorched wall and cloven safe door right ahead of him. He crossed the room in several strides and peered into the safe. There was no doubt; the diamonds were gone. He looked around again, saw his possessions scattered in the armchair by the fire and the carpet lifted from its smooth-edge all round the walls. He sank into the other fireside armchair, as white as a sheet.

‘Oh, my God,’ he breathed. He seemed stunned by the nature of the disaster and remained in the chair for ten minutes, breathing heavily and staring at the disarray.

Finally he rose and went to the telephone. With a trembling forefinger he dialled a number. At the other end it rang and rang, but there was no reply.

The following morning, just before eleven, John Preston walked down Curzon Street towards the headquarters of the department he worked for, round the corner from the Mirabelle Restaurant, in which few of the department’s employees could afford to dine.

Most of the civil service that Friday morning were being allowed to bridge over from Thursday, the New Year’s Day which was a public holiday anyway, into the weekend. But Brian Harcourt-Smith had asked him to come in especially, so he had come. He suspected he knew what the Deputy Director-General of MI5 wanted to talk about.

For three years, over half the time he had spent with MI5 since joining them as a late entrant in the summer of 1981, John Preston had been in ‘F’ Branch of the service, dealing with surveillance of extremist political organizations, Left and Right; with research into these bodies and the running of agents within them. For two of those years he had been in F.1, heading up (D) Section, concerned with the penetration of extreme Left-wing elements into Britain’s Labour Party. The result of his investigations, his report, had been submitted two weeks earlier, just before Christmas. He was surprised it had been read and digested so quickly.

He presented himself at the front desk, proffered his card, was vetted, checked out with the DDG’s office as an expected visitor, and allowed to proceed to the top of the building.

He was sorry he would not be seeing the Director-General personally. He liked Sir Bernard Hemmings, but it was an open secret inside ‘Five’ that the old man was ill and spending less and less time in the office. In his

Also by Frederick Forsyth

About the Author

About the Book

Epilogue

The Fourth Protocol

Frederick Forsyth

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