Fourth Protocol

  THE FOURTH PROTOCOL

  “Pure suspense.” —Saturday Review

  “Frederick Forsyth has hit the jackpot again. ... The Fourth Protocol is striking ... hard to put down. ... His grasp of the organization of various intelligence agencies is unimpeachable.” —The Wall Street Journal

  “The Fourth Protocol begins slowly and gently with a common jewel robbery and quickly evolves into an espionage thriller involving Great Britain, South Africa and the Soviet Union. ... As in all good spy novels there are plenty of threads that remain loose until the last 50 pages. ... Fast paced.” —Bestsellers

  “The Fourth Protocol is as good as anything he has done. ... Forsyth’s appeal in this kind of book goes well beyond his clockwork plots—and in The Fourth Protocol he is at the top of his form.” —Houston Chronicle

  “Will keep espionage fans turning the pages. ... The plotting is clever, and there is plenty of action, and a neat twist at the end.” —New Woman

  “Suspenseful plotting, direct and efficient writing, and detailing of everything from a safe-cracking to the smuggling of nuclear bomb components. ... The most fascinating spy novel since The Little Drummer Girl.” —The Christian Science Monitor

  “For sheer professionalism I give you the knowledge, invention and narrative skill of Frederick Forsyth who, ever since his The Day of the Jackal, has proved himself a master of the genre. ... In this large-scale novel of international intrigue he outdoes himself both as storyteller and in extrapolating fiction from the facts of world affairs. ... You will find it hard to stop reading once you have begun. ... His most ambitious and intricately constructed book to date. ... Forsyth has no peer.” —John Barkham Reviews

  “An exciting tale of espionage, filled with the sorts of twists spy-story aficionados love.” —Associated Press

  “Forsyth has meticulously constructed another intricate yet exciting spy novel. ... It succeeds magnificently ... as a scrupulously detailed study of spy ‘tradecraft’ and as a testament to the virtues of a well-constructed plot.” —Booklist

  “Forsyth is rather like watching a ballet. Each component—the prose, the pacing, the story, the characters—is beautiful to watch, the whole superbly executed, setting the blood running much as music does.” —Cosmopolitan

  “Pure Forsyth: a meticulous, detailed unraveling of a dastardly plot to send the world, or at least most of Europe, into ferment. ... Nary a reader, Forsyth veteran or otherwise, will be disappointed.” —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Frederick Forsyth is a giant among the creators of fictional international intrigue. ... Truly fascinating ... rousing.” —Kansas City Star

  “Frederick Forsyth, who once labored for the Reuters news service, burst on the thriller scene in pretty dramatic fashion a while back with his first novel The Day of the Jackal. ... Comes now The Fourth Protocol, which I’m sure Mr. Forsyth’s fans will gobble up.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Vitally suspenseful. ... Forsyth not only knows how to craft a successful suspense novel—he also has a well-developed sense of the political realities of confrontation between East and West.” —Seattle Times

  “Damnably good reading.” —St. Petersburg Times

  “The plots and counterplots of The Fourth Protocol race toward each other with shrewd complexity, unfolding with the brisk, mesmerizing suspense and clockwork timing that have become Forsyth’s trademarks. ... Forsyth’s proven again he is the unsurpassed master of the countdown thriller.” —The Charlotte Observer

  Bantam Books by Frederick Forsyth

  THE DAY OF THE JACKAL

  THE ODESSA FILE

  THE DOGS OF WAR

  THE DEVIL’S ALTERNATIVE

  NO COMEBACKS

  THE FOURTH PROTOCOL

  THE NEGOTIATOR

  THE DECEIVER

  THE FIST OF GOD

  This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  THE FOURTH PROTOCOL

  A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with Viking Penguin

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Viking edition published September 1984

  Bantam Export edition / April 1985

  Bantam edition / September 1985

  Bantam reissue / August 1995

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1984 by Frederick Forsyth.

  Cover art copyright © 1995 by Bantam Books.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Viking Penguin, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  ISBN 0-553-25113-9

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  OPM 18 17

  For Shane Richard, aged five,

  without whose loving attentions this book

  would have been written in half the time.

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART TWO

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART THREE

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  The man in gray 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 parking area 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 toward Hyde Park Corner.

  Sitting across from the luxury apartment building, dressed in a 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. Rawlings 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 Jaguar.

  It was a crisp and bright morning, with a pale wash of light over Green Park in the east, and the streetlights 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 December 31. 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 and allowed 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 toward 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 toward central London. Evidently, as he had hoped, they were going to join the wife’s brother, the Duke of Sheffield, at his estate 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 doubt he could take the apartment at Fontenoy House; he was, after all, one of the best safecrackers in London.

  By midmorning he had returned the Volvo to the rental company, the uniform to the costumiers, and the empty suitcases to his closet. 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 and 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 criminals, 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 specialty, 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 payrolls in broad daylight with shotguns and pickax handles left him alone.

  As was necessary, he had to have a front business to account for the money. All the successful faces had some form of legitimate occupation. Favored fronts have always been the taxi business (driving or owning), grocery shops, and scrap-metal yards. 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 hired muscle.

  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 just starting out on the fringe of the underworld and eager to do favors for a man of prestige, apart from the invaluable instruction he would get in the process. Twenty-four hours earlier, Billy had knocked at the door of the eighth-floor apartment at Fontenoy House, carrying a large bouquet of flowers and dressed in the livery of an expensive flower shop. 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, December 30, 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 eyes missed very little.

  Before even pressing the doorbell, he had spent a full minute scanning the outside of the door, its frame, and the surrounding wall area. 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 the 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 Brahmah, 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 since 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 doorjamb, was a tiny socket. Inside the socket, he knew, would be a Pye micros witch. 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 micro-switch would trigger the alarm if the contact was broken—that is, if the door was opened. It took Billy less than three seconds to bring out his tube of Super Glue, 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 doorjamb, from which he straightened up with an apologetic smile, smearing any surplus of glue 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 corridor to the apartment door, the small hallway behind the door, and what parts 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 from the microswitch, the door system, at least, would be inert. Rawlings was certain he could take that door lock within thirty mi
nutes. 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 Mira Prospekt 111 was also thinking of midnight. It would herald January 1, 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 he felt at contemplating his life, or what was left of it. His face, always lined, was now deeply furrowed. His hair, once thick and dark, was now snow-white, skimpy, and lifeless. His skin, after a lifetime of titanic drinking and chain-smoking, was blotched and mottled. His 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.