The Fourth Protocol (32 page)

But Semyonov could not understand, so he shook his head and tried to walk past. Then they were on him and he went down under a rain of blows. When he was in the gutter the kicking started. He dimly felt hands tearing at his gunnysack, so he clutched it to his belly with both hands and rolled over, taking the blows around the head and kidneys.

Devonshire Terrace overlooks that road junction; it is a row of solid, four-story, middle-class houses of buff and gray sandstone blocks. On the top floor of one, Mrs. Sylvester, old, widowed, alone, and riddled with arthritis, was unable to sleep. She heard the shouts from the street below and hobbled from her bed to the window. What she saw caused her to limp across the room to the telephone, where she dialed 999 and asked for the police. She told the police operator where to send the patrol car but hung up when asked for her name and address. Respectable people—and those of Devonshire Terrace are very respectable—do not like to get involved.

Police Constables Alistair Craig and Hugh McBain were in their patrol car a mile down the Great Western at the Hillhead end when the call came through. Traffic was nearly nonexistent and they reached the bus stop in ninety seconds. When the Neds saw the headlights and heard the siren, they ceased trying to rip away the gunnysack and chose to race away across the grass verge that separates Hughenden Road from the Great Western, so the patrol car could not follow them. By the time Police Constable Craig could leap out of the car they were disappearing shadows and pursuit was useless. In any case, the priority was the victim.

Craig bent over the man. He was unconscious and huddled in the fetal position. “Ambulance, Hughie,” Craig called across to McBain, who was already on the radio. The ambulance from the Western Infirmary came six minutes later. Meanwhile, the two officers left the injured man strictly alone, as per procedure, save that they covered him with a blanket.

The ambulance men eased the limp form onto a gurney and into the back of the vehicle. As they were tucking the blanket around the victim, Craig lifted the gunnysack and placed it in the rear of the ambulance. “You go with him, I’ll follow,” shouted McBain, so Craig climbed into the ambulance as well.

They all arrived at the hospital in less than five minutes. The ambulance men quickly wheeled the injured man through the swinging doors, down the corridor, around two corners, and into the rear of the casualty ward. As this was an emergency admission, there was no need for them to pass through the public waiting room, where the usual collection of small-hours-of-the-morning drunks nursed the cuts and bruises collected while in earlier contact with a number of unyielding objects.

Craig waited at the entrance while McBain parked the patrol car. When his partner joined him, he said, “You handle the admission forms, Hughie. I’ll go along and see if I can get you a name and address.” McBain sighed. Admission forms went on forever.

Craig collected the gunnysack and followed the gurney down the corridor to Emergency. This department at the Western Infirmary consists of a passage with swinging doors at each end and twelve curtained examination rooms, six at either side of the central corridor. Eleven of the rooms are used for examinations; the twelfth is the nurse’s office, and it is located nearest the rear entrance through which the gurneys come. The doors at the other end have one-way mirrors in their panels and give onto the public-waiting room where the walking wounded are made to sit and wait their turn.

Leaving McBain with a sheaf of admission-forms to fill in, Craig went through the mirrored doors to see the unconscious man on his gurney, parked at the other end. The nurse gave the injured man the usual once-over—he was alive, at any rate—and asked the orderlies to put him on a table in one of the examination rooms so that the gurney could be returned to the ambulance. The cubicle they chose was the one opposite the nurse’s office.

The house physician on duty that night, an Indian named Mehta, was summoned. He had the orderlies strip the injured man to the waist—he could see no signs of blood leaking through the trousers—and made a lengthier examination before ordering an X-ray. Then he left to attend to another emergency admission from a car crash.

The nurse telephoned X-Ray but it was occupied. They would let her know when they were free. She put on her kettle to make a cup of tea.

Police Constable Craig, having ascertained that his anonymous charge was still unconscious on his back across the corridor, took the man’s anorak, entered the nurse’s office, and placed both anorak and gunnysack on her desk. “Have you a spare cup of that brew?” he asked in the jocular familiarity used by people of the night who spend their duty hours cleaning up the mess of a major city.

“I might,” she said, “but I don’t see why I should waste it on the likes of you.”

Craig grinned. He felt through the pockets of the anorak and extracted a seaman’s paybook. It bore the photograph of the man in the examination room across the way, and was in two languages, Russian and French. He understood neither. He could not read Cyrillic script, but the name was in Roman letters also, in the French-language section.

“Who’s the patient?” asked the nurse, preparing two cups of tea.

“Looks like a seaman, and a Russian at that,” said Craig, perturbed. A citizen of Glasgow roughed up by a gang of Neds was one thing; a foreigner—and a Russian, at that—could spell problems. To try to discover what ship the man could be from, Craig emptied the gunnysack. It contained simply a rolled-up, thick-knit sweater, which was wrapped around a circular, screw-top tobacco tin. Inside the tin was not tobacco but a wad of cotton that shrouded two disks of aluminum with, between them, another two-inch-diameter disk of a dull gray metal. Craig examined the three disks without interest, replaced them in their bed of cotton, screwed the tin shut again, and laid it on the table beside the paybook. What he did not know was that across the corridor the victim of the mugging attack had come to and was peering through the curtains at him. What he did know was that it was time to tell Division that he had an injured Russian on his hands.

“Use your phone, pet?” he asked the nurse, and reached out for it.

“Don’t you ‘pet’ me,” called back the nurse, who was somewhat older than the twenty-four-year-old Craig. “God, they get younger every day.”

Craig began to dial. Just what went through
Konstantin
Semyonov’s mind will never be known. Dazed and confused, probably suffering a concussion from the kicks to his head, he could see the unmistakable black uniform of a British policeman with his back to him across the corridor. He could see his own paybook and the consignment he had been told to bring to Britain and deliver to the agent at the boating lake sitting on the table by the policeman’s hand. He had watched the officer examine the consignment—Semyonov himself had never dared open the tobacco tin—and now the man was phoning. Perhaps the seaman had visions of an endless third-degree examination in some reeking cellar beneath Strathclyde police headquarters. ...

The first thing Craig knew, he was roughly elbowed aside, caught completely unawares. A bare arm pushed past him, reached for the tin, and grabbed it. Craig responded quickly, dropping the telephone and grasping the outstretched arm. “What the hell!” he shouted; then, assuming the poor fellow was hallucinating, he grabbed the man and tried to restrain him. The tin was shaken from the Russian’s hand and fell to the floor. For a moment Semyonov stared at the Scottish policeman, then panicked and ran. Still calling, “Hey, come back here!” Craig thundered down the corridor after him.

Shortie Patterson was a drunk. A lifetime dedicated to sampling the produce of Scotland had made him unemployed and unemployable. He was no ordinary drunk; he had elevated intoxication to an art form. The previous day he had drawn his welfare allowance and gone to the nearest boozer; by midnight he had been paralyzed. In the small hours he had taken exception to the offensive attitude of a lamppost that refused to respond to his entreaties for the price of a dram, so he had hit the creature.

He had been in X-Ray with his broken hand and was going back down the corridor to his cubicle when a man with a bare and battered torso and bruised and bloody face came running out of an adjacent room pursued by a policeman. Shortie knew his duty to a fellow sufferer. He had no love for policemen, who seemed to have nothing better to do than pluck him out of perfectly comfortable gutters and hand him over to people who made him bathe. He let the running man pass him, then stuck out a foot.

“You stupid wee bugger!” shouted Craig as he crashed down. By the time he was up, he had lost ten yards on the Russian.

Semyonov came through the mirrored doors into the public waiting room, missed seeing the narrow door to the outside that lay to his left, and ran through the larger double doors to his right. This led him back into the corridor down which he had been wheeled thirty minutes earlier. He turned right again, to find approaching him a gurney surrounded by a doctor and two nurses holding up plasma bottles—Dr. Mehta’s accident victim. The gurney blocked the whole corridor; behind him Semyonov heard running boots.

To his left was a lobby containing two elevators. The door to one was just closing, and Semyonov managed to hurl himself through the gap. As the elevator rose, he heard the policeman banging impotently on the closed door. Semyonov leaned back and closed his eyes in misery.

Craig made for the stairwell and ran up. At every level he checked the lights above the elevator doors. It was still climbing. At the top and tenth floor he was hot, angry, and puffing.

Semyonov had got out at the tenth floor. He looked into one door available to him, but it opened onto a ward of sleeping patients. There was one other door, open and leading to a staircase. He ran up the stairs, only to find himself in another corridor, with shower rooms, a pantry, and storerooms along the sides. At the far end was the last door, and in the warm, humid night it stood open. It led to the flat roof of the building.

Craig had lost ground, but he made the final doorway eventually and stepped out into the night air. His eyes adjusting to the darkness, he made out the figure of a man by the north parapet. His annoyance died away. I’d probably panic if I woke up in a Moscow hospital, he thought. He started to walk toward the figure, hands held up to show they were empty.

“C’mon, Ivan, or whatever your name is. You’re all right. You got a bang on the heed, tha’s all. Come on away down wi’ me.”

Craig was accustomed to the darkness now. He could see the Russian’s face quite clearly in the glow from the city below. The man watched him approach until he was twenty feet away. Then he looked down, took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and jumped.

Craig could not believe it for several seconds, even after he heard the soggy smack of the body crashing a hundred feet down into the staff parking lot.

“Oh, Christ,” he breathed, “I’m in trouble.” With fumbling fingers he reached for his radio and called Division.

A hundred yards beyond the BP service station and half a mile from the bus stop lies a boating pond, in the shadow of the Pond Hotel. From the sidewalk a set of stone steps leads down to the walkway around the water, and close to the bottom of the steps are two wooden benches.

The silent figure in black motorcycle leathers checked his watch. Three o’clock. The rendezvous had been for two. One hour’s delay was all that was allowed. There was a second, backup rendezvous in a different place, twenty-four hours later. He would be there. If the contact failed to show up, he would have to use the radio again. He rose and left.

Police Constable McBain had missed the entire chase. He had been at his car checking exact times for the mugging attack and the logged appeal calls. The first thing he knew about it was when his “neighbor” (Glasgow slang for partner) came down into the waiting room looking pale and shaken.

“Alistair, have you got that name and address yet?” he asked.

“He is ... he was ... a Russian seaman,” said Craig.

“Oh, hell, that’s all we needed. How do you spell it?”

“Hughie, he’s just ... thrown himself off the roof.”

McBain put down his pen and stared in disbelief at his neighbor. Then the training took over. Any policeman knows that when things go wrong you cover yourself—you follow the procedures right down the line, no cowboy tactics, no clever-clever initiatives. “Have you called Division?” he asked.

“Aye, someone’s on the way over.”

“Let’s get the doctor,’ said McBain.

They found Dr. Mehta, who was already worked to fatigue by the night’s admissions. He followed them to the parking lot, spent no more than two minutes examining the gross and burst cadaver, pronounced it dead and no longer his concern, and returned to his duties. Two orderlies brought a blanket to cover it, and thirty minutes later an ambulance took the thing to the city mortuary on Jocelyn Square by the Salt Market. There other hands would strip off the rest of the clothing—shoes, socks, trousers, underpants, belt, and wristwatch—each item to be bagged and tagged for collection by investigating officers.

Inside the hospital there were more forms to fill out—the admission forms were kept as evidence, although now useless for practical purposes—and the two police constables bagged and tagged the rest of the dead man’s possessions. They were listed as: anorak, 1; turtleneck pullover, 1; canvas gunnysack, 1; thick-knit sweater (rolled), 1; and round tobacco tin, 1.

Before they were finished, about fifteen minutes after Craig’s call, an inspector and a sergeant, both uniformed, had arrived from Division. They were loaned an empty administrator’s office and began to take statements from the two constables. After ten minutes the inspector sent the sergeant to his car to call in the duty chief superintendent. It was then four in the morning of Thursday, April 9, but in Moscow it was eight o’clock.

General Yevgeni Karpov waited until they were out of the main traffic of southern Moscow and on the open road to Yasyenevo before he started to converse with Gregoriev. Apparently the thirty-year-old driver knew he had been singled out by the general and was eager to please him.