Arnold looked up. “Sorry?”
“I said well done,” Callows repeated.
“Thank you, sir, but it’s not over yet… “
“What are you saying, man?”
“I’m not sure, Sir Martin. Not yet. Can I stay on it a while?”
“What’s your angle?” Black asked. He had a profound respect for Arnold’s thought process.
“Why did she dump the file? It doesn’t make sense. It was like holding up her hand and saying ‘I’m spying…’”
“I’ve never understood women,” Callows muttered. “No. Go back to pruning roses or whatever you were doing…”
Arnold smiled. In his spare time he edited sections of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Can I just hang around a bit? See it finished?”
“If you must.”
Later that night, the two Directors General agreed to postpone the arrest of Meredith Mortimer to allow the watchers more time to see if a second meeting would take place, and a second group of watchers was placed on the Soviet Diplomat. The fact that he had remained unknown as a KGB staffer for so long made him a real professional, and the chances he had done the tag evasion course were very high, so this was the most experienced team assembled in years. Not that he would dream of trying to lose any watchers he found; he would simply take note of them and be aware that this was not the routine watching of all Soviet diplomats, rather something special just for him. He would then drop all his illegal activities to protect his network and could lie dormant for months – or worse, hand over the function to another case officer. With six hundred Soviets accredited at their Embassy in London, identifying the new controller with MI5’s limited resources would be almost impossible.
The task to crack Sergi Karmova’s network fell to MI5’s head of ‘D’ – their Counter Intelligence Section – and he quickly gave the Soviet the code name of BIG-EARS to link in the NODDY already flagged on Meredith Jane Mortimer’s file. Hopefully BIG-EARS would lead Five to the others in the network which became TOYTOWN.
Resources were shifted across to ‘D’ and new faces were brought in. The head of ‘D’ considered asking for Adrian Blacks’ return to Five, but knew it would be like drawing teeth from Sir Martin Callows and left it alone.
By the end of the third day, the Soviet’s file was three inches thick. There were now over seventy high resolution photos of the man and the watchers were all armed with a set of full frontal portrait, profile view and a batch of walking and talking shots. His flat in the rezendencia had been isolated and it confirmed his status. It was one of the larger three bedroom arrangements in the west wing, the floor plans thoughtfully provided by a window installation contractor who had done a double glazing job the year before and miraculously managed to plant several bugs for King and Country.
The first formal Inter Service de-brief on the TOYTOWN network was held on the ninth day of the stepped-up surveillance. MI5 bought four people along to sit in with Adrian Black, Sir Martin Callows – and, of course, Henry Arnold from MI6, who had somehow managed to stay on. The meeting was held on neutral ground in a high security area of the Foreign Office annex, a dreary prefabricated structure with dirty windows and cracked linoleum floors.
Colin Meynard-Smith, head of MI5 ‘D’ Section, opened the meeting with a recap and the first decent profile of BIG-EARS.
“That’s him,” he said, flicking a colour slide up on the tatty screen at the far end. “Major Sergi Karmova. Directorate IV KGB. A fully fledged grade one Moscow Centre bovva boy.”
Callows sipped noisily at a cup of tea and made a grunting noise like a wild boar. The Five people shifted uncomfortably. This was a breach of protocol. If they had known the Deputy Director General of MI6 was attending then they would have brought their own. They felt outgunned and outmanned. Black grinned at the illicit pleasure of watching his ex-comrades squirm and looked up at the face on the screen. The Russian was extremely good looking in a matinee idol fashion, with dark eyes, dark hair and a boyish grin.
Meynard-Smith went on. “He’s been at the London Embassy for five years. A long posting – which is what made us think he may have been clean. Chronologically, that means he would have recruited NODDY sometime that year because her access into your missing file took place after that, along with Christ knows what else…”
Callows snorted into his cup again, but Meynard-Smith continued valiantly, “We reckon it was a honey trap in reverse. Little cutie Sergi and NODDY.” With that, he changed the slide and Meredith Mortimer appeared life-size on the screen. She was a homely looking woman with large shapeless legs and mousy brown hair, clutching a tired looking handbag. “Let’s just say she is a rather ordinary looking woman. A man like Sergi Karmova, wine, promises of a loving future in a rose covered cottage or a Black Sea dacha or whatever, it would not take much.”
“Are they on the job?” Adrian Black asked.
“What?”
“Is he shafting her man?” Callows barked
“Yes, they went to a hotel that night. Checked in as a Mrs Thomas,” Meynard-Smith answered succinctly.
Black sat back, trying to imagine the pair in bed: sweaty sheets, grunts and moans and whispered endearments, elephantine thighs wrapped round the slims hips of the matinee man.
“I reckon he earned whatever he got then,” he said.
One of the Five people looked up. She was an attractive woman in her late twenties, with a Hermes scarf through her hair and a pair of sunglasses pushed up on her head. She had been studying the contents of her cup as if something alive might crawl out. “That was sexist and uncalled for,” she said primly.
“Bollocks!” Callows roared, a huge grin across his face. “I agree with him. Bloody Russian deserves a medal for humping this thing.” His head swung back to Meynard-Smith. “Carry
