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

knew it would have been easier for all if a route for disposing of the Glen Suite had been set up before the robbery. But he worked in his own way, which was extremely carefully. He trusted no one, least of all a fence, even a blue-chip, top-of-the-market fence like Louis Zablonsky. A fence, hit by a police raid and facing a long stretch of porridge, would be quite able to trade information on a coming heist against a let-off for himself. The Serious Crime Squad down at Scotland Yard knew about Zablonsky, even if he had never seen the inside of one of Her Majesty’s prisons. That was why Rawlings never preannounced one of his jobs, and always arrived unheralded. So he did not answer.
    In any case, Zablonsky was lost in contemplation of the jewels that sparkled on his blotter. He knew their provenance without being told. The ninth Duke of Sheffield, who had inherited the suite in 1936, had had two offspring, a boy and a girl. By 1974, when his son was twenty-five, the saddened Duke had been forced to realize that the exotic young man was what gossip columnists are pleased to call “one of nature’s bachelors.” There would be no more pretty young countesses of Margate or duchesses of Sheffield to wear the famed Glen Diamonds. So when the ninth Duke died in his turn, in 1980, be bequeathed them not to his son, the heir to the title, but to his daughter, Lady Fiona Glen.
    Zablonsky knew that after her father’s death Lady Fiona had taken to wearing the diamonds occasionally, with the insurers’ grudging permission, usually for charity galas, at which she was a not infrequent presence. The rest of the time they lay where they had spent so many years, in darkness in the vaults of Coutts on Park Lane. He smiled. “The charity gala at Grosvenor House just before the New Year?” he asked. Rawlings shrugged. “Oh, you’re a naughty boy, Jim. But such a talented one.”
    Although he was fluent in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew, Louis Zablonsky after forty years in Britain had never quite mastered English, which he spoke with a discernible Polish accent. Also, because he had learned them from books written years earlier, Zablonsky mistakenly used phrases that nowadays could be regarded as “camp.” But Rawlings knew there was nothing gay about Louis Zablonsky. In fact, Rawlings knew, because Beryl Zablonsky had told him, that the old man had been neutered in a Nazi Concentration camp as a boy.
    Zablonsky was still admiring the diamonds, as a true connoisseur will admire any masterpiece. He recalled vaguely having read somewhere that in the mid-1960s Lady Fiona Glen had married a rising young civil servant who by the mid-1980s had become a senior mandarin in one of the ministries, and that the couple lived somewhere in the West End at a most elegant and luxurious standard maintained largely by the wife’s private fortune.
    “So what do you think, Louis?”
    “I’m impressed, my dear Jim. Very impressed. But also perplexed. These are not ordinary stones. These are identifiable anywhere in the diamond world. What am I to do with them?”
    “You tell me,” said Rawlings.
    Louis Zablonsky spread his hands wide.
    “I will not lie to you, Jim. I will tell you straight. The Glen Diamonds probably have an insured value of seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds, which is roughly what they would fetch if sold legitimately on the open market by Cartier. But they can’t be sold like that, obviously.
    “That leaves two options. One is to find a very rich buyer who would want to buy the famous Glen Diamonds knowing he could never display them or admit ownership—a rich miser content to gloat over them in privacy. There are such people, but very few. From such a person one could get perhaps half the price I have named.”
    “When could you find a buyer like that?”
    Zablonsky shrugged. “This year, next year, sometime, never. You can’t just advertise in the personal columns.”
    “Too long,” said Rawlings. “The other