The Trinity Six (19 page)

‘Sam!’

It was a woman’s voice, a scream in the night. It made no sense that somebody should know his name. Gaddis veered into the road.

The car came to an immediate halt. Gaddis was standing in front of it, the headlights blinding him. As he adjusted his gaze, squinting and shielding his eyes from the glare, he saw, to his utter consternation, that Josephine Warner was at the wheel.

‘Get in,’ Tanya said.

Chapter 29

‘What happened, Sam? Tell me.’

Gaddis was staring at her, pressed back into the front seat as Tanya accelerated along Reichenberger.

‘Why are you here? What’s going on?’

‘I am not who you think I am,’ she said. ‘Tell me what happened.’ She turned to look at him. ‘You have blood on your jacket. Where’s Meisner?’

‘Meisner is dead.’ He knew that she was MI6. It was obvious to him now: the deception at Kew; the dinner; the coincidence of her trip to Berlin. He wished that he had kept running. ‘Meisner was shot. I just killed a man. What the fuck is happening? Why are you here?’

‘My name is Tanya Acocella. I’m an officer with the Secret Intelligence Service. We’ve been following you because of your investigation into Edward Crane. I’m sorry, it was necessary for me to pretend to be somebody else. Please try to stay focused. What do you mean, you just killed a man?’

It was almost a relief to hear her confession. At least he knew, finally, what he was up against. Then Gaddis told her what had happened and, as he did so, heard the truth of his own life and career, annihilated by what he had done. ‘Somebody was in the apartment,’ he said. ‘A Russian. Maybe the same man who killed Charlotte. Maybe the same man who killed Calvin. You know who these people are. You know what I’m talking about?’

‘I know what you’re talking about.’ Tanya’s eyes were fixed on the road.

‘We went back to get cigarettes.’ Gaddis wanted to be inside the car and outside the car. He wanted to be protected by this woman and yet he wanted to be as far from her as possible. ‘A man was inside the front door. He must have been waiting for Meisner. We must have surprised him. I don’t know what he was doing there. He shot him as soon as he walked in.’

‘Are you carrying a gun?’

Tanya was making a fast left-hand turn through a green light on a deserted roundabout. She could not understand how POLARBEAR had got out alive.

‘Of course I’m not carrying a fucking gun. I forced the door and it fell out of his hand. He can’t have been expecting two people. It fell in front of me. I picked it up because there was nothing else I could do. I just turned and shot. I think I may have killed him.’

‘Jesus, Sam.’

He didn’t like the fact that she used his name so easily. He had been duped by Crane and now he had been duped by Josephine Warner, a woman that – Christ! – he had hoped to sweet-talk into bed twenty-four hours later.

‘Look,’ she said, turning to face him, ‘do you understand what has happened to you?’

Gaddis moved in his seat, aware that he was soaked in sweat. He looked at his jacket and saw spots of blood sprayed across the sleeve. He felt as though he was locked down, trapped, and experienced a vivid need to wrench the wheel from Tanya’s hands and to send the car piling into a newsstand at the side of the road.

‘I should go to the police,’ he said, trying to remain calm. ‘I need you to stop the car.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that.’ Wipers swept dirt from the windscreen. ‘If you go to the police, Crane will be exposed. We can’t allow that to happen. The German authorities would very quickly start to piece things together. Whoever you killed tonight was almost certainly working for the Platov government. I need to get you out of Berlin and back to London.’

Gaddis looked again at his sleeve, streetlights pulsing on the blood.

‘How am I supposed to get out of Berlin?’ he said. ‘There are fingerprints on the gun. I passed a girl on the stairs as we came in. I was seen at the café with Meisner. The police will have a description of me in less than twenty-four hours. The only thing I can do is tell them the truth of what happened. Why I was meeting Meisner, why I was in Berlin, why the Russians wanted him dead.’

‘You cannot do that.’

He was bewildered and yet he knew why she was obstructing him. It was an MI6 cover-up. Nobody could know about Crane, about ATTILA, about Dresden.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘Tell me why? What is so fucking important about a twenty-year-old secret that people have to die in order to stop it coming out? I saw a man’s brains tonight. I saw Meisner’s head completely blown away.’

‘We are simply trying to protect the relationship between London and Moscow,’ Tanya replied feebly. She knew that she was retreating into platitudes and could hear the disgust in Gaddis’s voice.

‘What? What does that
mean,
Josephi—’ He began to use her cover name and felt a fool. ‘What relationship between London and Moscow? There
isn’t
a relationship between London and Moscow. You
loathe
each other.’

Tanya tried again, although she knew that what Gaddis had said was close to the truth. ‘The German press can’t get hold of this story, nor can they know about your involvement with Crane.’

Gaddis shook his head.

‘What happened in Dresden?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Dresden. Something happened in Dresden. On ATTILA’s watch, in the twilight of his career. Something involving Platov and Robert Wilkinson. Tell me what it was.’

‘Sam, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ This was the truth. She thought of Brennan and wondered if Gaddis had stumbled on the very secret which the Chief himself was surely trying to conceal from her. ‘We need to concentrate on
you
at the moment. We need to get you out of Berlin. There’ll be all the time in the world to hear your concerns when we are back in London.’

‘My concerns,’ he repeated witheringly. Tanya’s mobile rang and he gazed out of the window as she picked up.

‘Yes?’ Gaddis could hear a male voice speaking on the line and assumed that it was the man who had been watching him at the café. ‘No, I’ve got him,’ she said. ‘Something happened. Yes. Everything’s fine. I can’t speak now. Get everyone back to the flat. I’ll contact you there.’

‘Friend of yours?’ he asked when she had hung up.

‘Friend of mine,’ she replied.

‘Tell him I liked his girlfriend’s coat.’

Tanya ran an amber light. ‘Look. What can you remember? Was there any CCTV in the apartment building? Did you see a camera?’

‘I wasn’t looking. We were just going upstairs for cigarettes. We left the café to get away from your friends.’

‘But you say you passed a girl on the stairs?’

‘A Goth. Yes.’

Tanya was piecing things together, trying to find a way of saving him. He was oddly grateful for the effort. ‘And the receptionist saw your face at the surgery today.’

‘Oh great,’ he exclaimed. ‘You were there as well?’

‘We were there.’

She did not have the heart to tell him about the bug in his phone.

The Audi was skirting the edge of a park. In a floodlit cage, men were playing five-a-side football. Gaddis watched them and thought of Sunday nights in London. Another world.

‘What about Berlin?’ Tanya asked. She pulled the car into a quiet residential street and switched off the engine. ‘Who knew you were coming to meet Meisner?’

‘Just you,’ he replied. ‘Just Josephine Warner.’

She ran a hand through her hair, pushing away the slight. ‘What about Holly?’

‘What about her?’ Gaddis could glimpse another nail being landed in the coffin of his humiliation. ‘Is she one of yours too?’

‘Holly has nothing to do with us.’

‘Then why did she give me the files on the KGB?’

‘What files?’

‘Never mind.’

The street was deserted. He could smell Tanya’s perfume, the same scent that had drifted towards him at Kew. He was still drawn to her and he hated that about himself.

‘Don’t worry about the gun,’ she said suddenly, and again he had the feeling of being removed from himself, of looking at Sam Gaddis in the third person. ‘There’ll be fingerprints, but to the best of my knowledge, you don’t have anything on record. Is that the case?’

Of course. They knew all about him. They had combed through his past. MI6 would know about the divorce, about Min, about his work at UCL. Everything he had said and done for weeks had been analysed by Tanya Acocella.

‘That is the case,’ he said quietly.

There was nothing else to do but to go back to the Novotel. Tanya explained that one of the members of the surveil-lance team had taken a room on the third floor. By now, Gaddis was so numb to surprise that he merely nodded, his mind fixed on an image of Meisner’s brain which he could not erase.

‘We need to get rid of your jacket,’ she said, and Gaddis gave it to her without objection, then watched as she stepped out of the car and dropped it in a nearby bin. It was an old jacket, a cherished gift from his late father, but he felt no dismay; she might as well have been throwing away a newspaper. Tanya then made a call to Des and instructed him to buy two tickets to London on the first available flight out of Berlin. Twenty minutes later, he had rung back, telling her they were booked on a British Midland out of Berlin Tegel at 8 a.m.

‘My car’s at Luton,’ Gaddis said.

‘Somebody will pick it up for you.’

They drove back towards Tiergarten station, along the banks of the Landwehrkanal, the oblivious city slipping by. Tanya felt desperately sorry for him, wondering what must be going through his mind and regretting that it had been necessary to involve this decent man in a world that had now all but destroyed him.

‘I want you to promise me something,’ she said when she had parked at the hotel. They had been driving in silence for ten minutes.

‘What’s that?’

‘You can’t go to the police. Do you understand that, Sam?’ Gaddis did not reply.

‘If you turn yourself in, we can’t help you. The Russians will know who you are. You will face months, even years of legal problems in Berlin, and eventually Platov’s people will find you. Allow us to strike a deal with the Germans.’

He nodded, but she could not be sure if he had agreed.

‘We can protect you in England,’ she said. She needed to be absolutely certain of his co-operation. ‘We can make arrangements with the German authorities. Your involvement in what happened this evening need never come to light.’

‘You can’t possibly make a guarantee of that kind.’

Tanya reached for his hand and squeezed it. The gesture surprised both of them.

‘Let me at least try to convince you that I can. Stay in your room tonight. Leave with me in the morning. When we’re back in London, I promise you that everything will become easier.’

‘Easier,’ he said, wiped out by shock. He was hungry and craved a cigarette, but realized that he had left his packet in the inside pocket of a jacket which was now in a bin on the other side of Berlin.

They went into the hotel. Tanya walked beside him and, as they came into the lobby, put her arm around his back, whispering to him.

‘We are lovers,’ she said. ‘You are happy.’

It was enough of a trick to take them past any snooping eyes at reception. Gaddis looked at her as they reached the lifts.

‘You think of everything,’ he said, but she knew from his eyes that he despised her.

In the room, he took four miniature bottles of whisky from the mini-bar, filled a glass and drank them as a shot. He then went into the bathroom and sat under the shower for almost half an hour. All the while, Tanya waited outside. She called Brennan in London, explained what had happened, then watched German television for reports on the shootings in Kreuzberg. At eleven o’clock, a news channel went live to Reichenburger Strasse and she recognized the door of Meisner’s apartment building, now with police tape slung across the entrance. There were shots of bewildered neighbours – old women in nightgowns, young Turkish men in jeans and T-shirts – gazing up at the windows on the second floor.

‘Turn it off,’ Gaddis told her.

She sat with him, but they barely spoke. She had ordered sandwiches from room service but Gaddis left his food untouched. At around half-past two, sedated by hunger and whisky, he finally fell into a light sleep, waking an hour later to find Tanya staring at him from an armchair across the room. She wasn’t concerned for his welfare, he reflected. She was simply making sure he didn’t make a run for it.

‘What was true and what wasn’t?’ he said. His voice was low and cracked.

‘I don’t understand the question.’

‘Was there a sixth man or wasn’t there?’

‘There was a sixth man.’

Gaddis felt a pulse of satisfaction.

‘And the details? Did Crane really work with Cairncross at Bletchley? Did he run a ring of NKVD spies out of Oxford?

Tanya shook her head. ‘I really don’t know,’ she said.

He turned on to his side. ‘What about the switch? What about Dick White? Did Crane become a double agent or did he dupe you for another thirty years?’

‘That seems very unlikely,’ she said, sounding almost dismissive, but he wanted to educate her. It occurred to him that she was young enough to be one of his students.

‘Philby went to White,’ he said. ‘Did you know that? In ’63. They were on to him, so he made a marginal confession. Told them he’d been a Soviet spy but insisted that his betrayal had been confined to the war years. Everything after that, he said, had been for Queen and Country.’ Tanya was looking at him intently. ‘And they believed him. They let him go. Philby was such an accomplished liar that the finest minds in MI5 and MI6 fell for his line of bullshit. Less than a week later he was on a ship to Moscow. Maybe Crane pulled the same trick.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said, though this was no more than a hunch.

‘Why do you think people are being killed, Tanya?’ He had found a new belligerence, and took a bite from the stale club sandwich. ‘Why haven’t the British shouted from the rooftops about Crane? Do you ever think about that? Why is Sergei Platov ordering the assassination of anybody linked to ATTILA?’

‘Sam, I keep telling you, I don’t know.’ She realized now why she liked and admired him. At twenty-five, steered by ambition, Tanya Acocella had abandoned a promising career in academia for the lure of the secret world. Gaddis re presented both her past and her alternative future: a life of free enquiry, of scholarship. ‘There are elements to this operation which are so secret even I haven’t been made privy to them. Nobody on my team even knows who Crane is. As far as they’re concerned, this is just another job. My task was to find out what you knew. I wasn’t privy to your con versations in Winchester. All I know is that, under the terms of the Secrets Act, Crane was under oath never to discuss his career. That was the
quid pro quo
for setting him up as Neame. But obviously he’s got to the point where he wants to tell somebody about ATTILA, about what he’s done, because he’s ninety-one and doesn’t like the idea of going to his grave without people realizing what a bloody hero he is. So he told your friend, and now your friend is dead. He told her about Calvin Somers, and now Somers is dead as well. It may not be what you want to hear right now, but it’s only by extreme good fortune that you are still alive.’