Frederick Forsyth - The Fourth Protocol

“Which transmitter?” Karpov inquired.

“The one you called ‘Poplar.’ ”

Karpov nodded. All operations, agents, and assets had official code names. But Karpov had been a specialist on Britain for so long and knew London so well that he had private codes names for his own operations, and they were based on London suburbs whose names contained two syllables. The three transmitters he had caused to be placed in Britain were, for him, “Hackney,” “Shoreditch,” and “Poplar.”

“Any more, Pal Petrovitch?”

“Sure. These guys are never satisfied. The last one they took was Igor Volkov.”

Karpov knew of this Major Volkov, formerly of the Executive Action Department.

(When the Politburo had decided that straight hit jobs—“executive actions”—were becoming too embarrassing and that the Bulgars and East Germans should be told to do the dirty work, the department had begun to concentrate on sabotage.) “What’s his specialty?” he asked.

“Bringing clandestine packages across state borders, particularly in Western Europe.”

“Smuggling.”

“All right, smuggling. He’s good. He knows more about the borders in that part of the world, the customs and immigration procedures and how to get around them, than anyone else we’ve got. Well ... had , I should say. They took him, too.”

Karpov rose and leaned forward, placing both hands on the older man’s shoulders.

“Look, Starets , I give you my word, this is not my operation. I didn’t even know about it.

But we both know it has to be very big, and that means dangerous to start poking into.

Stay cool, bite the bullet, absorb your losses. I’ll try to find out quietly what is going on and when you will get your assets back. For your part, stay buttoned up tighter than a Georgian’s purse, okay?”

Borisov raised both his hands, palms forward, in a gesture of innocence. “You know me, Yevgeni Sergeivitch, I’m going to die the oldest man in Russia.”

Karpov laughed. “I think you will, too.” He pulled on his coat and made for the door.

Borisov followed to see him out.

When he reached his car, Karpov tapped on his driver’s window. “I want to walk for a bit. Follow me until I want to get in,” he said. He started down the snowy track, oblivious of the ice that clung to his town shoes and worsted trousers. The freezing night air was refreshing on his face, driving away some of the vodka fumes, and he needed a clear head to think. What he had learned had made him very angry indeed. Someone—and he had few doubts who it might be—was mounting a private operation in Britain. Apart from the massive snub to him as First Deputy Head of the First Chief Directorate, he, Karpov, had spent so many years in Britain, or running agents there, that he regarded it as his private preserve.

As General Karpov walked down the track lost in thought, a phone rang in a small flat in Highgate, London, not five hundred yards from the tomb of Karl Marx.

“Are you there, Barry?” a woman’s voice called from the kitchen.

From the sitting room a male voice replied, “Yes, I’ll get it.”

The man walked to the hall and took the phone while his wife continued preparing their Sunday dinner.

“Barry?”

“Speaking.”

“Ah, sorry to disturb you on a Sunday evening. It’s C.”

“Oh, good evening, sir.”

Barry Banks was surprised. It was not unheard of, but not often, that the Master called one of his people at home.

“Look, Barry, what time do you normally get to Charles Street in the morning?”

“About ten, sir.”

“Could you leave an hour earlier tomorrow and drop by Sentinel to have a word with me?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Good. Then I’ll see you about nine.”

Barry Banks was K7 at the Charles Street headquarters of MI5, but he was actually an MI6 man whose job was to act as Sir Nigel Irvine’s link with the Security Service. He wondered idly, as he ate the supper his wife had prepared, what Sir Nigel Irvine could want and why it had to be asked out of hours.

Yevgeni Karpov had not a shred of doubt that a secret operation had been mounted and was being carried out, and that it concerned Britain. Petrofsky, he knew, was an expert at passing for a Britisher right in the heart of that country; the legend that had been abstracted from Borisov’s files fitted Petrofsky to a T; the Poplar transmitter was hidden away in the north Midlands of England. If Volkov had been transferred because of his expertise at smuggling packages, there must have been transfers of other specialists, but from different directorates outside Borisov’s orbit.

All of which pointed unswervingly to the likelihood that Petrofsky would be going to Britain under deep cover, or that he had already gone. Nothing strange in that, it was what he had been trained for. What was strange was that the First Chief Directorate in the form of Karpov himself had been kept rigorously out of the operation. It made little sense, bearing in mind his own personal expertise concerning Britain and British affairs.

He went back twenty years in his connection with Britain, since that evening in September 1967 when he had been trawling in the bars of West Berlin frequented by off-duty British service personnel. As a keen and rising illegal, this was his assignment at the time.

His eye had fallen on a morose, sour-looking young man farther down the bar who was in civilian clothes but whose haircut had shouted “British armed forces.” Karpov had moved in on the lonely drinker and discovered he was a twenty-nine-year-old radio operator with a signals/intelligence (monitoring) unit, serving with the Royal Air Force at Gatow. The young man was thoroughly discontented with his lot in life.

Between that September and January 1968, Karpov had worked on the RAF man, first pretending to be a German, as was his cover, and then admitting he was a Russian. It was an easy “pull,” so simple as almost to be suspect. But it was genuine, all right; the Englishman was flattered to be the subject of KGB attention, had the inadequate man’s hatred of his own service and country, and had agreed to work for Moscow. During the summer of 1968 Karpov trained him in East Berlin, getting to know and to despise him more. The man’s tour in Berlin and his contract in the RAF was coming to a close, and he was due that September to return to Britain and demobilization. It was suggested that on leaving the Air Force, he apply for a job at Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham. He agreed, and in September 1968 he did precisely that. The young man’s name was Geoffrey Prime.

Karpov, to be able to continue to run Prime, was transferred under diplomatic cover to the Soviet Embassy in London. There he controlled Prime for three years until 1971, when he came back to Moscow and handed the job over to a successor. But the case had done his career a power of good, and he was promoted to major, with a transfer back to the Third Department. From there he handled Prime’s source material throughout the mid-1970s. It is axiomatic in any intelligence service that an operation producing excellent material will be noted and praised, and the officer controlling that operation is inseparable from the praise.

In 1977 Prime resigned from GCHQ; the British knew there was a leak there somewhere and the hounds were sniffing. In 1978 Karpov went back to London, this time as head of the entire rezidentura and with the rank of colonel. Although out of GCHQ, Prime was still an agent, and Karpov sought to warn him to keep a very low profile indeed. There was, Karpov pointed out, not a shred of proof as to his pre-1977 activities.

He’d be a free man today if he’d only been able to keep his dirty hands off little girls, thought Karpov savagely. For he had long known of Prime’s inadequacy, and it was eventually a grubby indecent-assault charge that brought the police to his door and led to his confession. He’d got thirty-five years on seven charges of spying.