The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth

way?”
    “Prise them out of their settings—that act alone would reduce the value to six hundred thousand pounds. Repolish them and sell them separately as four unmatched, individual gems. One might get three hundred thousand. But the repolisher would want his cut. If I carried those costs personally, I think I could let you have a hundred thousand—but at the end of the operation. After the sales had been completed.”
    “What can you let me have up front? I can’t live on fresh air, Louis.”
    “Who can?” said the old fence. “Look, for the white-gold setting I can get maybe two thousand pounds on the scrap market. For the forty small stones—put through the legitimate market—say, twelve thousand. That’s fourteen thousand pounds, which I can recover quickly. I can let you have half up front, in cash, now. What do you say?”
    They talked for another thirty minutes and clinched their deal. From his safe Louis Zablonsky took £7,000 in cash. Rawlings opened the attaché case and laid the wads of used notes inside.
    “Nice,” said Zablonsky, admiring the case. “You treated yourself?”
    Rawlings shook his head. “Came with the heist,” he said.
    Zablonsky tut-tutted and wagged a finger under Rawlings’s nose. “Get rid of it, Jim. Never keep anything from a job. Not worth the risk.”
    Rawlings considered, nodded, made his farewells, and left.
     
    John Preston had spent the entire day seeking out the various members of his investigative team to say his good-byes. They were gratifyingly sorry to see him go. Then there was the paperwork. Bobby Maxwell, his replacement, had come in to say hello. Preston knew him vaguely. He was an agreeable enough young man, eager to make a career in Five and seeing his best chances of promotion as lying in a policy of hitching his wagon to the rising star of Brian Harcourt-Smith. Preston could not hold that against him.
    Preston himself was a late entrant, having been inducted into the service direct from the Army Intelligence Corps in 1981, at the age of forty-one. He knew he would never get to the top. Head of section was about the limit for late entrants.
    Just occasionally, always to the dismay of the people who worked in Five, the post of Director-General went to someone from quite outside the service if there was no obviously suitable candidate within. But the Deputy Director-General, all the directors of the six branches, and the heads of most of the departments within the branches were by tradition lifelong staffers.
    Preston had agreed with Maxwell that he would spend that day, Monday, finishing off his paperwork and the whole of the next day briefing his successor on every current file and investigation. They had parted on that note with mutual good wishes until the morning.
    Preston glanced at his watch. It would be a late night. From his personal office safe he would have to get out every current file, check those that could safely go back to Registry, and spend half the night going through the current “bumpf” page by page, so that he could be ready to brief Maxwell in the morning.
    First he needed a decent drink. He took the elevator down to the subbasement, where Gordon has a well-stocked and cozy bar.
     
    Louis Zablonsky worked through Tuesday locked in his back room. Only twice did he emerge to see a customer personally. It was a slack day, for which, unusually, he was thankful.
    He worked with jacket off and shirtsleeves rolled up over his almost hairless forearms, carefully easing the Glen Diamonds from their white-gold settings. The four principal stones, the two ten-carat gems from the earrings and the matched twenty-carat pair from the tiara and the pendant, came easily and took little time.
    When they were out of their beds he could examine them more closely. They were truly beautiful, flaming and sparkling in the light. They were already known to be blue-whites, once also called “top river,” but now reclassified under the standardized