The Trinity Six (18 page)

‘That is not what you are saying, Doctor.’

Gaddis conceded the point. ‘You’re right. I need your assistance as well. There are things you may know which could help to keep both of us alive.’

Another silence. Tanya scratched an itch at the end of her nose.

‘Do you still retain any links to Douglas Henderson?’ Gaddis asked. His tone of voice had become more conciliatory. ‘Are you aware that his real name is Sir John Brennan and that he is now the Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service?’

Careful, Sam,
thought Tanya.
Don’t be giving away too many of our secrets
.

‘I did not know this,’ Meisner replied. His throat was dry and it sounded as though he took a sip of water.

‘The man whose death you orchestrated was called Edward Crane. He was a double agent for MI6. The Russians wanted him dead, so Brennan made them think that he had died of cancer.’

‘I had always wanted to know the answer to this question,’ Meisner replied quietly.

Gaddis pushed for more. ‘Do you remember anything at all about Crane? Did MI6 give you any indication what would happen to him? Were you ever asked to perform similar duties for British Intelligence at any point in the future?’

‘Of course not.’

‘What about ATTILA? Did anybody ever mention that name to you? Has anybody, apart from Charlotte Berg, ever spoken to you about what happened in 1992?’

‘You are the first person I have ever spoken to about it.’

Without seeing his eyes, Tanya could not tell if Meisner was lying, but the answer sounded truthful enough.

‘Then why do you think Somers was killed? Why do you think the Russians murdered Charlotte?’

Meisner emitted a strange, choked laugh. ‘Doctor Gaddis, it sounds to me as though these are questions to which you yourself should know the answer. I have nothing more. I have done nothing wrong. I was paid by MI6 to keep my mouth closed. I have
kept
my mouth closed. I signed your Official Secrets Act, just as once upon a time I signed a Hippocratic Oath. These things
mean
something to me. My reputation is important. If Benedict Meisner puts his name to something, if he makes a promise of any kind, then he keeps it. This is not a very modern concept, I grant you, but it is nevertheless essential to my own philosophy.’

There was another silence. The headphones had formed what felt like a pressure seal around Tanya’s ears and she briefly pulled them apart, feeling the sweat on her temples.

‘What about Thomas Neame?’ Gaddis asked. ‘Does that name mean anything to you?’

It was almost as if Tanya could see Meisner shaking his head. ‘I have never heard this name. Who is he please?’

She swore lightly under her breath and thought back to the Vauxhall Cross courtyard. Sooner or later, she had told Brennan, Gaddis is going to find out that Neame is the sixth man.
Exactly
, the Chief had said.
And when he does, that’s precisely the point at which we step in.
She had been furious at his deception, humiliated that her boss should have tasked her with tracking Gaddis’s movements without first supplying what was surely the most vital piece of information associated with the operation.
Need to know, I’m afraid
, he had told her, trying to soften the blow with one of his toadying smiles.
Only a handful of people in the world know what happened to Edward Crane. Now you’re one of them.

Gaddis was doing something in his seat. Tanya could hear what sounded like a scratching of cloth and wondered if he was taking off his jacket. But then the take quality became even clearer and she realized that POLARBEAR had removed the mobile phone.

‘I have a photograph of him,’ he was saying. Tanya put two and two together as Gaddis began to click through the images in the phone’s gallery. ‘Have you seen this man before?’

She waited. There was nothing she could do to prevent what was about to happen. She heard Meisner lift out of his chair and then the noise of the phone being passed across the desk. The sound Meisner made when he saw the photograph of Neame in the pub was just what she had expected: a breath of disbelief.

‘But this is the man,’ he told Gaddis. ‘This is the man who was admitted to the hospital. The person in this photograph is not your Thomas Neame. The person in the photograph is Edward Crane.’

Chapter 28

It was only a small consolation to Gaddis that he had briefly suspected Neame and Crane of being the same man. Otherwise, he felt wretched and embarrassed, duped by a master liar. There was no memoir, he reflected. There was no memoir because Thomas Neame
was
the story. All that time, he had been talking to the sixth man but had been too dumb and too greedy to see it. The sensation was not dissimilar to the hollow feeling of being betrayed by a friend, or manipulated by a jealous colleague; he was humiliated, but he was also intensely angry. All his life, Gaddis had wanted to think the best of people, to take them at face value and to trust that human decency would win through. Of course, it was naïve to think this way, to believe that the world had his best interests at heart. He should have seen what Crane was up to. Here was a man, like Philby, who had lived his entire adult life as an elaborate masquerade. Crane did not so much possess a personality as a series of masks; as each mask was removed, it was replaced by another. Neame was simply the latest in a long line of parallel lives, a role played as much for Crane’s personal amusement as for the practical purpose of disguising his real identity. In his youth, Crane had pretended to the British government that he was a loyal and dedicated servant of the Crown, yet all the while he had been passing secrets to the NKVD. He had then coolly switched allegiances, having long since convinced Moscow that his heart belonged to Mother Russia. The two positions were mirrors of each other, reflections of the same ideology. Edward Crane had no country. Edward Crane had only himself.

Looked at from this perspective, it made absolute sense to Gaddis that Crane should have chosen to tell the ATTILA story through a shell personality; it would have been contrary to his nature to expose his true self. A spy needed the protection of a cover story, a pseudonym. Besides, Crane would have enjoyed the intellectual challenge of duping Gaddis; doubtless he had derived enormous satisfaction from gulling a so-called leading academic. At what point had he been planning to come clean? Would he have gone to his grave as Thomas Neame, holding on to this last, elusive secret? Almost certainly. Why break the habit of a lifetime?

‘POLARBEAR looks well fucked off,’ said Des, following Gaddis on foot from Meisner’s surgery. Meisner had agreed to meet him at a café near his apartment in Kreuzberg at eight o’clock. ‘Whoever the fuck this Edward Crane is has put our boy in a very bad mood indeed.’

Two hundred metres away, Nicolai Doronin was also watching Meisner’s surgery, though he paid scant attention to Gaddis as he came out on to the street at half-past four, incorrectly assuming that the six-foot man with a corduroy jacket and leather satchel was a resident of one of the luxury apartments on the fourth or fifth floors. Nor did Doronin notice Des getting out of a blue-black Audi A4 on the corner of Schönhauser Allee in order to tail Gaddis to the U-Bahn at Eberswalder Strasse. Doronin’s interest lay solely in Benedict Meisner. He had been watching the doctor for forty-eight hours. He had established that he lived alone, had learned his daily routine, calculated his approximate physical strength, pondered his likely resistance to violent assault. On balance, Doronin felt that it would be wisest to pursue a similar strategy to that which had succeeded with Charlotte Berg. Just as Alexander Grek had broken into her office, he would access Meisner’s apartment, add 10mg of sodium fluoracetate to the bottle of water which Meisner kept by his bed, and return to London on the next scheduled flight from Tegel.

Doronin had not expected to carry out the plan until the following day, but having tailed Meisner back to his apartment on Reichenberger Strasse he had waited outside for an hour, only to see the doctor emerge at ten to eight wearing a fresh set of clothes and carrying a copy of
Der Spiegel
. It was obvious that he was going out for dinner. Sure enough, Doronin followed Meisner the length of Liegnitzer Strasse to his favourite café, which was a few hundred metres away on the corner of Paul-Lincke-Ufer. Meisner took an outdoor table, scanned the menu and ordered a glass of beer. This presented Doronin with a window of opportunity. He was keen to return to London so that he could spend at least some of the weekend with his young son. If he could pull off the Meisner operation tonight, he could be back at his flat in Kensington by lunchtime the next day.

So Doronin missed seeing the six-foot man with the corduroy jacket and the leather satchel getting out of a cab on Liegnitzer Strasse. Less than three minutes after he had turned and walked back in the direction of Meisner’s apartment, Sam Gaddis had pulled up, spotted Meisner and sat down at his table.

British Intelligence, on the other hand, were ahead of the game. Knowing that Meisner and Gaddis had arranged to meet at the café, Katie and Ralph had positioned themselves on the terrace, ordered two enormous bowls of onion soup, occasionally held hands for cover, and waited for POLARBEAR to show up. Tanya was sitting outside Meisner’s apartment, at the opposite end of the street, texting them from the front seat of the Audi. To her fury, POLARBEAR had left his mobile at the Novotel, which meant that audio coverage of his conversation with Meisner would now be impossible.

The café was popular with local families. Even at eight o’clock in the evening, young mothers were breast-feeding their children in the cool autumnal air, fresh-faced fathers bouncing toddlers on their knees. But service was slow. Gaddis had been sitting with Meisner for five minutes before the ageing hippie waitress deigned to show up and take his order for a cup of coffee.

‘You want a
coffee
?’ asked an incredulous Meisner. ‘At this time of night?’

Gaddis explained that it had been a long day – ‘I was up at five’ – and turned his attention to the menu. The café offered the sort of food he loathed: right-on stews, bean soups, tofu salads sprinkled with snow peas and pine nuts. He would have killed for a rib-eye steak.

‘What the hell’s a bio-bratwurst?’ he asked, but the doctor merely stared at him blankly through his tortoiseshell glasses. He had the distracted look of a man coming to terms with the indiscretions of his past. Gaddis scanned the food on the neighbouring tables. Surely there was something worth eating? Beside him, two undernourished Scandinavians were picking gingerly at a rocket salad. A string of lights was suspended over their table, hung between two chestnut trees. In the other direction, a young couple – British, by the look of their clothes – were holding hands and finishing off two large bowls of onion soup.

Gaddis froze.

He had seen the woman before: that afternoon, on the southern edge of the Holocaust Memorial, leaning on a bicycle and staring past him in the direction of the Reichstag. He had noticed her because she had been wearing a yellow overcoat identical to one that Holly had worn on a date to the cinema. He looked at the woman’s chair. Sure enough, the same coat was draped around the back of her seat.

Was he under surveillance? Gaddis’s coffee arrived and he was grateful for the distraction because it meant that he could fix his attention on the waitress. There was a small macaroon resting on the saucer and he swallowed it in an attempt to keep his behaviour natural.

‘Damn,’ Meisner said.

‘What?’

‘I forget my cigarettes.’ The doctor was checking his pockets, patting the inside of his jacket. ‘Would you mind waiting here while I go back to my apartment? It is just around the corner, just a few minutes away.’

Was this part of the surveillance operation, part of some pre-arranged plan? Was Meisner working in tandem with the British? Gaddis was about to offer him one of his own cigarettes when he realized that Meisner’s suggestion had presented him with the opportunity to leave the café.

‘Can I be honest?’ he said.

Meisner frowned. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Would you mind if we ate dinner somewhere else?’

‘Are you cold or something? They have blankets inside.’

‘No. It’s not the cold. I’d just rather we finished our drinks, fetched your cigarettes and went somewhere else to eat.’

Meisner suddenly saw what Gaddis was driving at. His face seemed to draw back on to its bones. When he lowered his voice, it was tight with nerves.

‘You think there is a possibility that—’

Gaddis interrupted him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think there is that distinct possibility.’

They stood up immediately. Gaddis drained his coffee in a single gulp, secured a ten-euro note under a sugar bowl and led Meisner off the terrace. They were fifty metres up Liegnitzer when he turned and saw the man who had been sitting with the woman in the yellow overcoat crossing the street behind them. He was speaking into a mobile phone.

‘I think POLARBEAR just made us,’ Ralph was telling Tanya. He was embarrassed, spitting with rage. ‘
Fuck
it. He’s coming towards you. Looks like they’re heading to Meisner’s apartment.’

‘We will go into my home and think what to do,’ Meisner was muttering. Gaddis was concerned by how quickly his companion’s mood had deteriorated into outright panic. ‘Why did you bring these people to me? Everything was fine in Berlin until Doctor Sam Gaddis shows up.’

Gaddis turned again but could not see anybody following them. A part of him wanted to walk back to the café and to confront the couple at their table. Who were they? Who had sent them? He was certain that nobody had followed him from Shönefeld, but it would have been all too easy to trace his movements via his credit cards, or even by locking on to the signal emitted by his mobile phone. Yet he had accidentally left that at the Novotel. How had they found him?

At the north end of Liegnitzer, Meisner turned left into Reichenberger Strasse, a broad residential street, now in semi-darkness. At one point, Tanya was no more than fifteen feet away from them, concealed in the gloom of her parked Audi. She saw Meisner reach for his keys as Gaddis followed him into the building. They both looked tense. There had not been time to install audio/visual in Meisner’s apartment, so she knew that whatever took place between them, whatever they discussed, would remain secret.

The building was a restored nineteenth-century apartment block with two flats on each level. Halfway up the stairs they passed a teenage Goth wearing torn denim jeans and a black leather jacket. She ignored Meisner and kept her head bowed as she walked past Gaddis, clomping down to the lobby. On the second floor, Meisner placed his key in the lock, opened the door of his apartment, and stepped inside.

Something caused him to pause on the threshold and Gaddis bunched up behind him as they walked in. He looked up. A gun had appeared from behind the door, levelled at the left side of Meisner’s head. In the same instant, a shot was fired, a shot almost without noise, which sent a spume of brain tissue thumping into a gilt mirror on the right-hand side of the passage. Instinctively, Gaddis put all of his weight against the door and forced it open. Meisner had slumped to the ground beneath him. He felt someone blocking the door on the other side and pushed harder. A man swore in Russian and Gaddis saw the gun fall out into the corridor.

He should have run. That would have been the smart thing to do. He should have closed the door and sprinted downstairs. But Meisner’s body was blocking the way. Instead, terrified that the Russian would pick up the gun, Gaddis went forward into the apartment and scrambled across a polished wooden floor. He could sense Meisner’s assailant behind him, already clambering to his feet, but he had time to reach the gun and to turn, levelling the barrel at the man’s body. The Russian came towards him and Gaddis fired.

The bullet hit Nicolai Doronin on the right side of the chest, just below the shoulder blade. There was a gasp of pain as he slumped to the ground, staring wildly at Gaddis. His finger still on the trigger, Gaddis fired again, this time out of panic. The second shot seemed to go through the man’s neck and there was a sharp crack, as if a wall or a door jamb had been hit. Gaddis had not fired a pistol since he was seventeen years old, shooting at targets in a field in Scotland, and he was bewildered by the power, by the simplicity of what he had done. He glanced down at the barrel and saw that a silencer had been fitted. That was why there had been no noise. All he could hear was the sound of his own breathing, as fast as if he had sprinted up the stairs. He looked back towards the door. There was blood on the walls, blood in the passage. Meisner wasn’t moving. The Russian was moaning and turning away from him, bunched up in a foetal crouch near the wall.

He should have stayed. He realized that later. But in that moment, in the aftermath of what he had seen and done, Gaddis wanted to be out of the building, as far from the apartment as possible. He moved towards Meisner and saw, to his horror, that the entire left side of his head had been completely removed. He was looking into a man’s brain and it was no more than a few shards of tissue and bloodied hair and he was almost sick on the floor. He did not look at the Russian. He knew that he did not have the courage to shoot him again nor to check if he was still alive. Had he killed a man tonight? He should have rung the police. He should have alerted a neighbour. But instead Gaddis sprinted, almost flew, in three-step leaps down the stairs of the apartment building and out on to the road.

Tanya jerked forward in the Audi when she saw him coming out. She instantly knew that something was wrong. It was as if a wind had blasted Gaddis into the street. She saw him begin to jog along Reichenberger, apparently without direction or purpose. She switched on the engine, reversed into the street and followed him in a first-gear crawl.

Gaddis became aware of the Audi when he was about three hundred metres from Meisner’s apartment. It could only be the Russians, he thought, the accomplices of the man he had just shot. They were following him down the street and they meant to finish the job. His mind was scrambled. He was sick with fear, sick with guilt at what he had done. He wished that he had kept the gun that had felled the Russian, but realized that he had dropped it on to Meisner’s body as he stared at his wounds. He looked back. The Audi was fifty metres away. Why was it coming so slowly? Why were they not intent on killing him? He stopped and turned, suddenly overcome by a desire to confront them. There were two members of the public walking on the pavement on the opposite side of the street. Would they dare to kill him in the presence of so many witnesses?