This was the nitty gritty. Was he working any other agents? The KGB paymasters may have considered Meredith Mortimer worthy enough for a dedicated controller. If so, they could arrest her now.
“We haven’t been able to establish that yet. It’s way too soon.”
Callows expected nothing else. He knew how exhaustive the work would be. Every time BIG-EARS stopped to scratch his nose, the team would be looking for a possible recipient of the potential signal. Every time he stopped to eat or buy a paper or have a drink, they would be watching for a signal or a drop-box or a dead letter pick-up location. Just because he’d been caught red-handed with one of his cell didn’t mean he was that open with all – and, as Meynard-Smith had pointed out, he couldn’t work the honey trap with dead letter letters and cut-outs.
“How long do you want to give it?”
“About six months to be sure,” Meynard-Smith answered. “He would have to contact even his most distant agents in six months.”
“Try one,” Callows answered.
“Impossible!”
“One. No discussion. I have a traitor in my department. Bad enough that we may have to swallow the fact that she’s been passing material from registry for four years, without it going on for any longer than absolutely necessary.” His voice had a deep timbre now. He spoke quickly and eloquently, as he did when deadly earnest. Those who knew him knew that this was the time when you simply shut up and listened. “Now, you and I know that, if he doesn’t make a mistake in a month, then he may not for six or a year or two years. So let’s give it a month. If nothing breaks, you people arrest her – or I will do it myself under Clause Seventeen of the Official Secrets Act Amendment.”
“Sir Martin...” Meynard-Smith began.
“Don’t worry about your D-D G. I will phone him as soon as this meeting is over. But you must leave here understanding that you have one month only to nail BIG-EARS with anything extra. Then we look at the other alternatives, but either way Meredith Mortimer is done for.”
“If we move too fast, we may have a job proving it in court…”
“I think not. If this is really a honey trap, you’ll be going to court with an admission and a full confession, and tears on the pillow and the-bastard-promised-to-marry-me.”
“And if not? If we’re wrong and the vetting didn’t work and we have a communist here?”
“She’s no communist,” Callows said with surprising compassion. “She’s a lonely spinster helping the only man who ever looked at her twice. That’s why honey traps work and that’s why they will always work.”
With the meeting seemingly over, they all stood, and the woman in the Hermes scarf studying Sir Martin Callows with a new respect.
“When we pick her up, I would like to talk to her,” Arnold said. It had been the first time he had spoken.
Meynard-Smith was collecting his slides from the carousel. “Sorry Henry, that’s SB’s bailiwick.”
“Who do I talk to there?”
“Chief Inspector Conners. He’s all right, buy him a scotch or something.” He didn’t look up from his little slide box, so Arnold wrote the man’s name down and walked out to get a ride back to Milburn with Adrian Black.
Three weeks later, the watchers had to admit that they were unlikely to nail the Soviet in the given month. If he had other agents in his network then he made no mistakes – and he hadn’t seen Meredith Mortimer again. The MI5 Deputy Director General had made token protests about Sir Martin Callows’ ultimatum but, in the end, he had to agree he had a point.
It was with three days to run that Special Branch reluctantly agreed to make the arrest. Henry Arnold joined the arresting officers and the rummage team that would take the Datchet house apart. Now, he sat in the front seat of a large four door saloon, the dusk settling over the river while, behind him, two officers argued the merits of Wolverhampton’s football team. The man at his side was listening to the awkward scratchy chat on the radio.
None of them had seen the man watching from the riverbank where he sat with a fishing rod and thermos of something hot.
In the car, Arnold leant forward to wind down the window; the cigarette smoke wafting over from the back seat was making him cough.
“You all right?” someone in the back asked.
“Yes, fine,” he answered. “Just the smoke.”
“Won’t be long now. She’s never much later than this.”
As if that were the cue, the radio hissed and the driver leant forward to turn up the volume.
“Right, that’s it,” he said, “, she’s coming…”
Arnold tensed in the seat. This was it.
Someone tapped on the window and, winding it down, he looked out at a hard looking young man in a leather jacket.
“The boss says, if you want in with the first lads, then you better join us…”
Arnold nodded and climbed from the car, stretching as he did so. Then he walked back the forty feet to the second car, where three men were climbing from the darkened interior. One had a sledge hammer in his hands and another put a pistol in his pocket.
A big man in a tired looking overcoat began to speak.
“Right. We ring the bell. Sergeant, you in first. If she tries anything silly, stop her. She may have a shooter, you never know – but just make your point, don’t go doing a Wyatt Earp all right?”
The man with the pistol nodded, almost bored. He must have done a few of these, Arnold thought.
“Now, watch out for ‘er old mum. We don’t know if she’s in on the muck so treat ‘er nice while she treats us nice. Who’s got the warrant?”
“Me, DI,” someone said.
“Let’s go then.” He turned to look at Arnold. “Just stay behind the lads till we know who’s home.”
“Isn’t this a little dramatic for a spinster and
