The story of the British diplomats caught using a transceiver hidden inside a rock in Moscow as their dead-letter drop would not, in itself, make a novel. What we know is only the tip of the iceberg; the novel is the rest of the iceberg.
Who were the diplomats collecting information from? Was there an array of small-scale agents, each using a transmitter to pass their secrets on to a stone? If there were, then the information would have been scuttlebutt and gossip.
But if there were just one Russian spy — let’s call him Igor — then he might have been a star agent. Maybe Igor was a four-star general, or a senior official in the Moscow Circus. That would certainly account for why Russian President Vladimir Putin is so angry, and his anger is surely the only explanation as to why the Russians have gone public with the story so early. And while the arrest of a Russian has been reported, Igor has probably not been caught: if he had, the Russians would have been boasting about it.
When this becomes a novel or film, Igor will become the principal character. The British diplomats are just gofers. They will be expelled, but they can be replaced. The thing about trade-craft is that the dangers in approaching the dead-letter drop are all faced by the Russian agent. The diplomats could have retrieved the information without leaving their cars — and these count as British territory.
So where is our fictional Igor? Maybe he has fled the country. During the Cold War, getting agents out from behind the Iron Curtain was a terrible problem. But now he could have hopped on a sleeper for Berlin. He could have got on a plane to Paris. He could even have dashed over the border to Poland, now that it is in the European Union, and there is nothing the agents of Russia’s Federal Security Bureau could have done.
Meanwhile, in our novel, the British spooks will be working on inventing a new transceiver that can be even more cunningly hidden. Maybe inside a plastic penguin to put inside the penguin enclosure, or in a fake crow that sits on a tree branch all winter and all summer, picking up messages.
And, of course, we need some comic relief. That will come with the efforts of the Russian security services to remove any other concealed transceivers from their country. And so the most hated job assigned to prisoners in Russia will be rock duty: hunting through the country’s parks checking whether the rocks are real or espionage equipment.
Our final paragraph would see our hero, having been spirited out of the country, receiving a quiet call in the middle of the night at his hideout, from Russia: “Now you can have your fucking rocks back.” — Â