Read Online The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth - Free Book Online Page B

his brakes. Sheets of sparks flew out from his wheels. The freight train began to slow, but nowhere near enough. Mouth open, be watched through the windshield as the headlight flew toward the crumpled figure. Two men in the yard had had it happen to them before; whether the victims had been suicides or drunks, no one ever knew. Not afterward. With this kind of rig you don’t even feel the thud, they had said. He didn’t. The screaming locomotive flashed over the spot at thirty miles an hour.
    When he finally stopped he could not even look. He ran to one of the farms and raised the alarm. When the police came with lanterns, the mess under his wheels looked like strawberry jam. Hans Grobbelaar did not reach home until dawn.
     
    That same morning, John Preston entered the lobby of the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall, approached the desk, and used his universal pass to identify himself. After the inevitable check call to the man he had come to see, he was escorted into the elevator and down several corridors to the office of the ministry’s head of internal security, a room high at the back of the building and overlooking the Thames.
    Brigadier Bertie Capstick had changed little since Preston had last seen him, years before, in Ulster. Big, florid, and genial, with apple cheeks that made him look more like a farmer than a soldier, he came forward with a roar of “Johnny, my boy, as I live and breathe. Come in, come in.”
    Although only ten years older than Preston, Bertie Capstick had a habit of calling almost anyone his junior “my boy,” which gave him an avuncular air, matched by his appearance. But he had been a tough soldier once, moving deep into terrorist country during the Malay campaign and later commanding a group of infiltration experts in the jungles of Borneo during what was now called the Indonesian emergency.
    Capstick sat Preston down and produced a bottle of single malt from a filing cabinet. “Fancy a snort?”
    “Bit early,” protested Preston. It was just past eleven o’clock.
    “Nonsense. For old times’ sake. Anyway, the coffee they bring you here is abysmal.”
    Capstick sat himself down and pushed the glass toward Preston across his desk. “So, what have they done with you, my boy?”
    Preston grimaced. “I told you on the phone what they’ve given me,” he said. “Bloody policeman’s job. No disrespect to you, Bertie.”
    “Well, same with me, Johnny. Out to grass. Of course I’m retired from the Army now, so I’m not too bad. Took my pension at fifty-five and managed to get this slot. Not too bad. Potter up on the train every day, check up on all the security routines, make sure no one’s being a bad lad, and go home to the little woman. Could be worse. Anyway, here’s to the old days.”
    “Cheers,” said Preston. They drank.
    The old days had not been quite so genial as that, thought Preston. When last he had seen Bertie Capstick, then a full colonel, almost six years before, the deceptively extroverted officer had been Deputy Director of Military Intelligence in Northern Ireland, working out of that complex of buildings at Lisburn whose data banks can tell the inquirer which IRA man has scratched his backside recently.
    Preston had been one of Capstick’s “boys,” working in civilian clothes and undercover, moving through hard-line Provo ghettos to talk with informers or pick up packages from dead drops. It was Bertie Capstick who had loyally stuck by him in the face of the wittering civil servants from Holyrood House when Preston was “burned” and nearly killed while on a mission for Capstick.
    That was May 28, 1981, and the papers carried a few sparse details the following day. Preston had been in an unmarked car and had entered the Bogside district in Londonderry on his way to a meet with an informer. Whether there had been a leak higher up, whether the car he was driving had been used once too often, or whether his face had been “made” by the Provo