The Trinity Six (17 page)

Chapter 26

Forty minutes earlier, Tanya Acocella had been passed a note informing her that Dr Sam Gaddis – now known by the cryptonym POLARBEAR because, as Brennan had observed, ‘he’ll soon be extinct’ – had visited an Internet café on the Uxbridge Road and purchased an easyJet flight to Berlin. He was due to leave London Luton at 8.35 on Friday morning, returning two days later. The fare had been charged to Gaddis’s Mastercard and he had booked two nights at a Novotel at Tiergarten as part of a package deal with the airline. Tanya had wondered why Gaddis was using a public computer, rather than the PC at his house in Shepherd’s Bush, and concluded that he was at last becoming aware of the surveillance threats posed by his interest in ATTILA.

As the sun was coming down on what had been a crystal-clear day in London, she called Sir John Brennan.

‘Do the names Robert Wilkinson and Dominic Ulvert mean anything to you in the context of ATTILA?’

Brennan had just come off the Vauxhall Cross squash court and was boiling with sweat. He asked Tanya to repeat the names and, when she did, swore so loudly that his voice could be heard by a cleaning lady in the women’s changing rooms.

‘Where the fuck is Gaddis getting his information?’ he snapped. ‘Meet me in the courtyard. Half an hour.’

While Brennan showered and changed back into a grey suit, Tanya ran a trace on Wilkinson and Ulvert, encountering the same wall of obstruction and restricted access which had characterized her earlier searches for Crane and Neame. Somebody, somewhere, was trying to prevent her from doing her job. It was the first thing that she mentioned to Brennan in the courtyard. He had closed the access door back into the building so that they were alone in an area normally populated by smokers. Nobody would disturb the Chief in such a situation.

‘Forgive me for saying this, sir, but I believe there are some things you haven’t told me about ATTILA.’

Brennan peered down at Tanya’s legs. He had pulled a muscle in his arm playing squash.

‘Perhaps there are things you aren’t telling
me
,’ he replied, turning around. He didn’t feel that it was appropriate for Acocella to be criticizing his methods. ‘Last time we spoke, you told me that Gaddis was investigating Harold-bloody-Wilson. Now, for some reason, he’s stumbled on Robert Wilkinson.’

‘As you said, sir, AGINCOURT was a wild-goose chase.’

‘Fair enough, fair enough.’ Brennan’s mood now changed abruptly. He had known, as he put on his suit, that he would have to come clean about certain aspects of the ATTILA cover-up. Tanya could hardly be expected to perform effectively with one hand tied behind her back. ‘I should perhaps have been more candid from the start.’

Tanya was surprised that Brennan should capitulate so readily.

‘Bob Wilkinson was Head of Station in Berlin when the Wall came down. He’d been operating in East Germany for the best part of a decade. Ulvert was one of his pseudonyms. In 1992, the FSB tried to assassinate him in London. The attempt failed, but he consequently emigrated to New Zealand, to get as far away from his old life as possible.’

‘Why did the FSB want him dead?’

‘Because of his relationship with ATTILA.’ Tanya searched Brennan’s face as she listened, still sensing that he was holding something back. ‘The Russians were embarrassed that they had been duped for so long, so they set about bumping off anybody who had been associated with Crane.’

‘
Anybody
? Doesn’t that constitute quite a large number of people? Crane was operational for almost fifty years.’

Brennan took her point but could not, for reasons which he hoped she would never be aware, express himself more candidly.

‘The victims tended to be senior figures who had been directly involved with Crane in the 1980s,’ he said, fudging it. ‘A KGB officer named Fyodor Tretiak, for example, had been ATTILA’s handler in East Germany from ’84 onwards. Tretiak was assassinated while walking back to his apartment in St Petersburg in 1992. Bob Wilkinson had a bomb attached to his car in Fulham and only survived because he checked his vehicles religiously as a hangover from Northern Ireland. Left shortly afterwards for Auckland, under rather a cloud, if I’m honest. Hasn’t spoken to anybody in the Service for over ten years and not likely to.’

‘What sort of cloud?’

Brennan mumbled his answer, to the extent that it was almost carried off on the wind. Tanya had to take a step towards him and wondered why he was still being so obtuse. She looked down and saw that one of his immaculate brogues was scuffed, as if somebody had scrubbed the toe with a wire brush.

‘Bob felt that we hadn’t done enough to protect him.’ Brennan seemed genuinely contrite as he recalled the incident. ‘He felt that the measures extended to ensure the safety of Edward Crane might also have been extended to him.’

‘What kind of measures?’

A smile briefly flickered on Brennan’s face as he recalled the heyday of Douglas Henderson. ‘I arranged for Eddie to die of natural causes.’

It had always been Tanya’s deepest fear that she had signed up for a organization which would stoop to murder as easily as it stooped to deceit. But she had misinterpreted what Brennan was telling her. He allayed her fears with a gesture of apology.

‘No, no. There’s no need to be alarmed.’ Tanya nodded, but she had seldom felt more uncomfortable in the five years that she had been working for SIS. ‘Eddie was already in his mid seventies. As you say, he’d given decades of loyal service. He deserved a peaceful retirement, so I had him brought into a hospital in Paddington, crossed a few palms with enough silver and, lo and behold, he died of pancreatic cancer in February 1992.’

‘Did one of the palms you crossed go by the name of Meisner?’

Brennan hesitated for a fraction of a second.

‘Meisner, yes.’ Tanya was studying him intently. What was he holding back? ‘He was the senior doctor on duty the night Crane was brought into the hospital. How did you find out about him?’

‘Gaddis mentioned his name on one of the surveillance tapes.’ It was strange, but at this moment she felt a greater loyalty towards Gaddis than she did towards her own side. Tanya knew that she was being lied to, and it irritated her intensely. ‘He’s obviously going to Berlin to meet him.’

‘You might try to keep an eye on him there,’ Brennan suggested.

‘It’s already organized.’ Tanya enjoyed the look of surprise on Brennan’s face. ‘I’m flying out tomorrow. There’ll be a surveillance team in place.’

It was a coup, no question. Brennan nodded approvingly. Tanya saw this and seized the opportunity to push for more information.

‘So what about Crane?’ she asked.

‘What about him?’

‘Where is he now? Where did he go to? What happened to him after the hospital?’

Brennan looked back towards the door. It was the question to which everybody wanted an answer.

‘Eddie lives near Winchester,’ he replied, knowing that it was only a matter of time before Tanya discovered the truth for herself. ‘I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to tell you before. After Paddington, we gave him a new identity. You’ll find him at the Meredith Nursing Home in Headbourne Worthy. He now goes by the name of Thomas Neame.’

Chapter 27

Gaddis had realized that there was no point in door-stepping Benedict Meisner. He recalled the email Meisner had written to Charlotte threatening legal action if she continued to allege that he had been involved in faking the death of Edward Crane. If Gaddis showed up in Berlin making the same accusation, Meisner would most likely slam the door in his face or, worse, call the police.

So he needed a more subtle plan of attack. He found a listing for Meisner’s surgery online and called the number from a public phone at UCL. The receptionist spoke perfect English and Gaddis asked if it would be possible to make an appointment for Friday afternoon.

‘Of course, sir. But we have only the limited opportunities tomorrow. I can offer you a consultation with the doctor at four o’clock. Is this suiting you?’

Gaddis took the appointment, gave the number of his hotel in Berlin, and wondered what he was going to use as a cover story.
I’m having trouble sleeping, Doc. Do you have a cure for paranoia?
The next morning, he set his alarm for five, drove up the M1, parked his Volkswagen in an offsite car park three miles from Luton Airport and caught the 8.35 easyJet to Berlin Schönefeld. A two-euro ticket on the 171 bus from the airport took him, at snail’s pace, through a grid of bright, well-tended suburbs peopled by German geriatrics. The bus, which stopped perhaps thirty or forty times en route, eventually came to a halt in Hermannplatz, where Gaddis caught the U-Bahn to Tiergarten. The Novotel was just across the street from the underground station, an upmarket executive hotel with a polished-stone lobby, tri-lingual receptionists and businessmen killing time between meetings in a low-lit bar. Ordinarily, Gaddis would have searched out a more idiosyncratic place to stay – a twelve-room, family-run hotel, a place with some character and charm – but on this occasion he was grateful for the soullessness of the Novotel, for his starched third-floor room and his flat-screen plasma TV showing films-on-demand and CNN. It made him feel reassuringly anonymous.

He had a couple of hours to kill until his appointment with Meisner and decided to go for a walk, winding along the quiet, narrow paths of the Tiergarten, then alongside the traffic on the Strasse des 17 Juni, past the Siegessäule and the memorial to Bismarck, then east in a plumb line to the Brandenburg Gate. Though he knew that there was no possibility he would ever be able to shake off whatever surveil-lance was thrown at him by the British or the Russians, Gaddis had made an effort to ascertain if he had been followed from London. At Luton, for example, he had made a mental note of his fellow passengers as they waited in the departure lounge, then scanned the 171 bus for matching faces, trying to work out if someone was tracking him into Berlin. At the Novotel, before embarking on his walk, he had left through the main entrance, loitered in the car park for ten seconds, then turned on his heels and returned to the lobby, in an effort to flush out a tail. Though he realized that these were amateur tricks, culled from movies and thrillers, at no point did he sense that he was being followed. Increasingly, in fact, as the hours and days went by, Gaddis began to believe that his interest in ATTILA had gone completely unnoticed.

All of which was a credit to the SIS watcher who had sat five rows behind him on the Easyjet, then followed the 171 bus to Hermannplatz in a hired Audi A4 which had been waiting for him at the airport. ‘Ralph’, who was in his mid-thirties and usually operated for MI5 in London, had also taken a room at the Novotel and now tailed POLARBEAR on foot as Gaddis made his way towards the Brandenburg Gate. Two hundred metres behind him, on a rented bicycle, Ralph was being backed up by a second pavement artist, known as ‘Katie’, who had flown out to Berlin with Tanya Acocella twenty-four hours earlier. The third member of the surveil-lance team, known as ‘Des’, was holding back in the Audi on Hofjägerallee, awaiting further instructions from Tanya. Tanya herself was installed in an SIS-rented apartment half a mile from the British Embassy on Wilhelmstrasse. She knew that POLARBEAR planned to meet Meisner, but did not yet know where the encounter would take place, nor for what time it had been scheduled.

Gaddis hadn’t been to Berlin since 1983, when he had been a student on a school trip peering over the Berlin Wall at East German border guards who stared back through war-issue binoculars, trying to put a gloss on their boredom. The span of time put Gaddis in a contemplative mood and for five long minutes he stood directly beneath the Brandenburg Gate, reflecting on how the city had changed in the past quarter of a century and pressing the palms of his hands against the stonework in a moment of sentimental contemplation which sent Ralph into paroxysms.

‘He’s doing something weird underneath the Gate,’ he told Tanya, speaking into a mobile phone. ‘Looks like he’s stretching his back. It might be a signal.’

‘Hold your position,’ Tanya replied. ‘Let’s see who shows up.’

But nobody showed up. POLARBEAR eventually walked towards the Reichstag, seemed to be put off by the length of the queue taking tourists inside to gape at Norman Foster’s dome, then retraced his steps and spent fifteen minutes on the south side of the Brandenburg Gate, strolling around the Holocaust Memorial.

‘Don’t lose him in there,’ Tanya warned Ralph, because she knew that the Memorial was a five-acre maze of granite blocks, some as high as fifteen feet, into which Gaddis could quickly disappear. She was now sure that he was using amateur trade-craft – hence his little platform jig at Waterloo Station – and it was certainly not beyond his capabilities to have arranged to meet Meisner in the centre of the Memorial, where they could not possibly be overheard.

Meanwhile, Katie had ridden her bike to the corner of Ebert and Hannah-Arendt Strasses, at the south-western edge of the Memorial, working on the assumption that POLAR-BEAR would eventually come out and make his way south towards Checkpoint Charlie.

‘I reckon he’s just doing the tourist thing,’ she said, a view with which Tanya and Ralph concurred when POLARBEAR’s head was observed poking out from a granite block twenty feet from the street. Moments later, Gaddis had emerged on to Hannah-Arendt, lit a cigarette, and walked east on to Friedrichstrasse, where he stood beside a postbox, looking around for a cab.

‘He’s obviously waiting for a taxi,’ Ralph duly announced, and Tanya ordered the Audi to within two hundred metres of his position while Ralph looked around for a cab of his own.

‘This is it,’ she said. ‘Don’t lose him.’

They didn’t. The Audi got there in three minutes and tailed POLARBEAR all the way to Prenzlauerberg, a fashionable quarter of former East Berlin where the city’s bohemian elite bought their vinyl records and drank their lattes. Ralph found a taxi two minutes after Gaddis but was called off after being reassured by Des that the ‘situation is very much under what I like to call control’. At 15.46 Gaddis was observed paying the driver of the cab and stepping out on to Schönhauser Allee.

‘He’s a block from Meisner’s office,’ Tanya declared, looking down at a map of Berlin. She had visited the location at nine o’clock the previous evening. ‘Let’s see if we can get his phone to work.’

POLARBEAR’s mobile was her only potential problem. Two days earlier, when Gaddis had left it unattended in his office at UCL, an SIS technician had succeeded in installing a piece of software which turned the phone into a remotely activated microphone. The bug had worked once, successfully, when Ralph had tested it from a car parked outside Gaddis’s house, but things were always more complicated in an overseas location. Meisner’s surgery was also on the third floor; getting a clear signal down to the Audi would take a mixture of luck and finesse.

Out on the street, Gaddis had found the entrance. A plaque outside announced:

BENEDICT MEISNER AKUPUNKTUR HOMÖOPATHIE WIRBELSÄULEN UND GELENKTHERAPIE

It was a mystery. How did a trained medical doctor end up practising acupuncture and homeopathy in Berlin? Had Meisner been struck off? Gaddis looked at his watch and realized that he had ten minutes to kill before his appointment. It was enough time in which to call Josephine Warner.

‘He’s taking out his phone,’ Des announced.

Josephine answered the call with an enthusiasm appropriate to the circumstances.

‘Sam! Are you here?’

‘
Ja
,’ Gaddis replied in cod-German, immediately regretting the joke. ‘How’s your sister?’

She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Annoying the shit out of me. I’ve realized why I never come to visit.’

Gaddis smiled. ‘Then I can persuade you to abandon her for dinner tomorrow night?’

‘You definitely can.’ Josephine was already flirting with him and – who knows? – perhaps even toying with the prospect of a post-dinner nightcap on the third floor of the Tiergarten Novotel.

‘I know a place,’ Gaddis told her, because he had researched decent Berlin restaurants on the Internet and booked a table for two – just in case – at Café Jacques in Neukölln.

Before long, they had fixed a time and a place and Gaddis had hung up, ringing the bell of Meisner’s surgery. Des duly activated the bug in POLARBEAR’s mobile and, within moments, Tanya Acocella was listening to Gaddis as he introduced himself to the receptionist.

‘
Guten Tag
,’ he said. ‘I apologize. I don’t speak German.’

‘This is all right, sir.’

‘I have an appointment with Doctor Meisner at four o’clock.’

To Tanya’s relief, the take quality was first class; she was listening through a set of headphones and it was as if the conversation was taking place in the next room. She heard the receptionist asking Gaddis to fill out a form – ‘just some of your personal and medical information please’ – then the sigh of Gaddis slumping into an armchair, a brief crash on the bug as he reached for a pen in the inside pocket of his jacket, and a rustle of paper as he filled out the form.

Three minutes later, a telephone rang in the waiting room. The receptionist picked it up and Gaddis was invited ‘please to go through now’ to Meisner’s surgery. He offered to return the medical form, but was told to keep it with him and to ‘please to show it to the doctor when you arrive’. Tanya tried to picture Gaddis ducking through the connecting door and shaking Meisner’s hand. She was wondering what the hell he was planning to say to him.

‘So! We are both doctors!’

Meisner had a thick German accent and sounded chirpy and easygoing.

‘That’s right.’ Gaddis’s voice was flatter, more nervous. ‘Different areas of expertise, though. I don’t tend to save lives on a daily basis.’

She liked that, the flattery. Gaddis was softening him up.

‘Oh, I don’t save lives any more, Doctor. I simply relieve the pain. And what is your area of expertise?’

‘I’m an academic, at University College, London.’

‘Ah! UCL! Sit down, please, sit down.’

Another cushioned slump as Gaddis settled into a chair. Tanya heard him explain that he was a lecturer in Russian History in the Department of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies. Meisner kept saying ‘
Ja, ja
’ and appeared to be enormously interested in everything Gaddis was saying.

‘Really? Is that right? How fascinating. I myself lived in London some time ago.’

‘You did? Whereabouts?’

‘In the Hampstead area. I worked at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington for a number of years. Do you know it?’

‘I know it.’

This, of course, was POLARBEAR’s opportunity and Tanya wondered if he would take it. Typically, in a conversation of this type, it was better to show one’s hand earlier, rather than to build up an implicit trust which was then shattered by the truth.

‘In fact, that’s sort of the reason why I’ve come today.’

He was going for it. Tanya heard Meisner say: ‘I am sorry, I don’t quite understand’ and felt her stomach kick. She pressed the headphones closer to her ears.

‘I’m afraid I’m here under false pretences, Doctor.’

‘False pretences—’

Meisner sounded confused, defensive.

Gaddis pressed on. ‘I don’t have an underlying medical condition. I’m not looking for treatment of any kind. I wanted to talk to you about your time at St Mary’s. I knew that you wouldn’t see me if I told you who I was or why I was coming here today.’

Tanya tried to imagine Meisner’s reaction. He wore tortoise-shell glasses over lively, expressive eyes, and his broad, tanned face was genial and unassuming. There was a long silence. Somebody sniffed. She could hear a tapping sound and assumed that Meisner was rapping his fingers on the surface of his desk.

‘You were in communication with a friend of mine,’ Gaddis began.

‘Charlotte Berg,’ Meisner replied immediately. All of his bedside
bonhomie
had evaporated. ‘I must ask you to leave immediately.’ Tanya heard the noise of a chair scraping back on a hard floor. Meisner was getting to his feet.

Gaddis said: ‘Please, just hear me out. I have come here to warn you. My visit is for your own safety.’

‘Doctor Gaddis, please do not let me lose my temper. Do you wish me to call the police? I can either ask you to leave in a civilized fashion or I will have no hesitation—’

‘Charlotte Berg is dead.’ POLARBEAR had held his nerve. ‘She was most probably killed by Russian intelligence.’

The ensuing silence was so pronounced that Tanya wondered if the microphone had failed. She was about to call Des when Meisner responded:

‘And why is this of any concern to me?’

‘You remember Calvin Somers?’

‘As I told Miss Berg, I have no recollection of an individual of that name and, if you insist on making allegations of this kind, I will have no hesitation to pursue libel actions against you in a court of law.’

‘Somers is also dead.’ Gaddis’s reply contained just the right level of threat. ‘He was murdered, again most probably by Russian intelligence.’

She heard Meisner sniff, then a hole of silence. Gaddis spoke into the void.

‘I don’t need to tell you that this only leaves you and the porter still alive.’

‘The porter?’

‘Waldemar. Lucy Forman died in a car accident in 2001.’ This piece of information pushed Meisner back into his chair. Tanya wondered if either man knew that Waldemar had died in Krakow in 1999. ‘I don’t know if the crash was an accident or if it was engineered. All I’m saying is that you need to watch your back.’