The Trinity Six (20 page)

Gaddis laughed. ‘And do I have you to credit for that, Tanya? Should I be writing MI6 a thank you letter?’

She shook her head in frustration and looked at him as if he was being unnecessarily confrontational.

‘Who’s Peter?’ he asked her.

‘Special Branch,’ she replied, because she wanted to be as honest as the circumstances would allow.

Of course
, Gaddis thought. Not a private sector spook hired by Crane to protect Neame, but a first line of defence for the most illustrious spy in the history of MI6. ‘And he was happy to co-operate in Crane’s decision to go public? Why didn’t he come running and tell you lot what was going on?’

‘Divided loyalties, I suppose. You know as well as anybody that Edward Crane can be a very persuasive man.’ It was a mean-spirited remark, but Gaddis accepted it without objection. ‘Perhaps he offered to cut Peter in on the profits. Perhaps Peter came to believe that ATTILA’s story deserved to be told. Who knows?’

He lay back on the pillow. His head throbbed and he asked Tanya to pass him the water. He drank from the bottle, setting it on the bedside table. It was strange, but she was beautiful to him again. He remembered their conversation at dinner, the way that she had looked at him, and felt a fool for having believed in her.

‘We need to talk about the morning,’ she said. ‘In a few hours we’ll be checking out. The airport is one place they might be looking for you.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘You say the person that you shot was Russian. The police may assume he was working with an accomplice. They’ll be looking for a third man, for the person who left the crime scene. That somebody would probably try to leave Berlin as soon as possible.’

‘Then why are we going?’ he asked.

‘Because they won’t suspect us.’

‘Us?’

‘We’ll be together. We’ll be arm in arm.’

He sat up and hit the master switch on the panel of lights beside the bed. The room blazed. ‘There’s no way I'm doing that.’

‘It’s the best way, believe me. The simplest strategy. Just a couple coming back from a romantic break in Berlin. A lone man would draw more attention. You’ll just have to trust me, Sam. It’s the only way.’

Chapter 30

They left the hotel at six. Further news had emerged about the shootings at Reichenberger Strasse. According to German television, Meisner’s assailant was still alive and had been taken into intensive care, where he was in a stable condition. This was scant consolation to Gaddis and did nothing to lift his mood of despair. He may no longer have been responsible for taking a man’s life, but the horror that he had witnessed at Meisner’s apartment was still as vivid and as shocking to him as the mutilation of a child.

‘We need to be careful,’ Tanya told him as Des drove them out to the airport. ‘If you see someone you know at any point, either in the terminal or on the plane, and if you can’t avoid them, act normally.’ She seemed oblivious to Gaddis’s state of mind, thinking only of the security of the operation. ‘If you feel the need to explain who I am, introduce me as your girlfriend. My name is Josephine. We’ve been staying in Berlin since Tuesday.’

Gaddis shook his head and gazed out of the window in disbelief.

‘Sam, this is important.’ She turned in her seat to face him. ‘You need to concentrate. You need to pull yourself together. I know that you have misgivings about me. But we need to get this thing done. It’s the only way for you to get home with no questions asked.’

‘Have we enjoyed ourselves?’ he asked. A tone of macabre humour coloured the question. ‘Has it been fun spending time together? Do you think our relationship might lead to something more serious?’

Des glanced across and caught Tanya’s eye.

‘This isn’t helpful, Sam.’ Tanya had barely slept. She was dressed in a smart blue suit and had the organizing, nervous energy of a woman with a lot on her mind. As soon as they landed in London, she was under orders to head directly to Vauxhall Cross for an emergency meeting with Brennan, who was ‘incensed’ that she had broken cover. ‘As I said last night, posing as a couple is the most sensible strategy.’

‘Of course.’ Gaddis made no attempt to disguise the contempt in his voice. ‘Your complicated love life.’

They checked in at seven. In the security area, Gaddis was obliged to remove his boots and a leather belt from his jeans, but was glad to have something to occupy his hands as he queued in front of the scanner; it was the standing around, the waiting, which made him despondent and anxious. For the next fifteen minutes they loitered in a bookshop, flicking through paperbacks and guides to Berlin. Tanya occasionally attempted to engage Gaddis in polite conversation, but he knew that it was solely for cover and his replies were monosyllables of indifference. Forty minutes before they were due to take off, they made their way in silence along a series of strip-lit corridors to passport control.

‘I’ll do the talking,’ Tanya said, settling into the queue, but when the time came to approach the booth, their respective passports barely merited a glance from the customs official. At this early hour, they were simply waved through with a stifled yawn.

Gaddis slept most of the way back but the brief rest did nothing to lighten his mood. Landing in London, the wretchedness of Friday’s events settled on him again. He thought continually of Charlotte and of the obliterated skull of Benedict Meisner. There was a driver waiting for them in Arrivals, another Des wearing a pair of jeans and a nylon anorak, holding a sign which said ‘JOSEPHINE WARNER’ in bold, handwritten capital letters. Gaddis saw it and felt a lurch of anger: the double-life was all around him. He longed to be free of it, to be in Barcelona with Min or away in Paris with Holly, to go back to the life he had known before Charlotte’s death.

‘You’re going to go home,’ Tanya told him when they had made their way to the car park at Gatwick and settled in the back seat of a bottle-green Vauxhall Astra. ‘There’s no need to come with us, no reason to fear for your safety. As far as we are aware, nobody else has been looking at your Internet traffic, nobody else has been listening to your phone calls. The man in the apartment was obviously waiting for Meisner. He was the next link in the chain after Charlotte and Somers. For some reason, the Russians don’t know about you. You should feel very grateful for that.’

‘Well, I guess that’s one advantage of having MI6 snooping around in your dustbins,’ Gaddis replied. It was a damp, featureless morning in England, no blue in the sky. ‘They can at least reassure you that they’re the only organization committing a flagrant breach of your privacy.’

Tanya had grown accustomed to his fractious moods. She was sympathetic to them, but knew that she had a duty to toe the party line.

‘Look, Sam, I’m trying to tell you that this has worked out very well for you. You can go back to your life. You can live normally. It will be like none of it ever happened.’

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized the mistake. Gaddis turned on her.

‘I think Charlotte being murdered
happened
, Tanya.’

‘I know. That’s not what I meant, I’m sorry—’

‘Calvin Somers’s death
happened
.’

She reached to touch his arm. ‘Sam—’

‘Last night, an innocent man lost his life because sixteen years ago he was dumb enough to go into business with MI6. Benedict Meisner’s assassination
happened
. How am I supposed to forget that? In what way can I go back to a “normal life”?’

Tanya tried a different approach. ‘What I’m telling you is that you
have
to forget about it.’ She was under no illusions that things were going to be easy. ‘Just as you have to forget about the book. That’s the deal we’re making. That’s the only choice you’ve got.’

Gaddis knew that there was no point in arguing with her. She was on her way to see the great and the good of MI6, men with sufficient influence to have his involvement in the shooting erased from the record. That was their speciality, after all – the rewriting of history. Tanya had promised that MI6 would ‘strike a deal with the Germans’. In return, all Gaddis had to do was stop digging around Edward Crane.

‘ATTILA is over,’ she said. ‘Crane will be moved from Winchester. Peter is going to lose his job. You won’t see either of them ever again.’

They were crawling around the M25, boxed in by lorries and bored men in vans. Gaddis thought of Peter pulling him around the Hampshire countryside with a Sean Connery satnav for company and felt a sting of guilt that he would now be out of a job. ‘What if Crane tries to contact me?’ he asked. He hadn’t thought through the question; he had merely wanted to provoke a reaction in Tanya. But the thought gave him a glimpse of an idea. Had MI6 seen the hushmails? Might he still be able to communicate with Crane via an encrypted message?

‘Crane won’t try to contact you,’ Tanya replied, but there was no conviction in her voice.

‘How can you be sure?’ Gaddis was beginning to believe that he could save the book. It was extraordinary to him, but in spite of everything that had happened, he was determined to finish what he had started. ‘You think a man like that isn’t capable of deceiving MI6?’

‘I think Edward Crane is capable of anything.’

‘Precisely.’ He looked out of the window. He needed to give the impression that his interest in ATTILA was over, to lie with the same finesse that Tanya had shown in deceiving him. ‘Anyway, you have nothing to worry about. I understand my situation. If he calls, I’ll ignore him. I’d rather wash my hands of the whole thing.’

‘You would?’

‘Sure. What am I going to do, run the risk of getting shot by the FSB?’ Tanya acknowledged the inevitability of Russian involvement with a brisk nod. ‘I understand the terms of our deal.’

He looked at her face, tiredness beginning to colour her eyes. It was strange, but it felt wrong to be deceiving her. The events in Berlin had forged a strange kind of bond between them.

‘I’ll go back to UCL,’ he said. ‘The book won’t get written. With any luck this will be the last time we ever see one another.’

Chapter 31

They dropped him at his house in Shepherd’s Bush and Gaddis found it just as he had left it a little more than a day earlier.

But, of course, it was no longer the same house. It was now a house with tapped phones, a house with bugged rooms, a house with a computer that spoke to faceless geeks at Vauxhall Cross and GCHQ. He opened the curtains in the sitting room and looked out at the cars parked on the street. There was a van directly opposite his front door, a van with blacked-out windows.

This is my future
, he thought.
This is the price of consorting with Edward Crane
.

In an act of petty defiance, he walked outside, banged on the panelling of the van, said: ‘Make mine with two sugars,’ then went down to Uxbridge Road, entered a phone box and dialled Peter’s number. The connection was dead. No message or sound. Just a void at the other end of the line. Hungry and strung out, he took a Tube to UCL, dealt with his post and emails, then bought a new jacket at a store on Great Marlborough Street from a teenage shop assistant who popped bubbles of gum as she ran his credit card through the till.

He needed cash. He needed a new mobile phone. He needed to find a way of living his life which would restore some degree of privacy to his punctured existence. Nowadays everything left a trail: there would be number plate recognition on his car; alerts on his Oyster card; triggers every time he used a bank account. Gaddis would have to assume, at least in the first few weeks of his arrangement with Tanya, that MI6 would continue to watch him, to ensure that he did not break his word. His calls, his emails, his movements around London would all be monitored by an army of watchers whom he would never sense, never identify, never see.

He took out £900 from an ATM on Shaftesbury Avenue, the daily limit on his three accounts now that Nat West had wired him the proceeds of yet another £20,000 personal loan. He bought a monthly Travelcard. He paid cash in a shop on Tottenham Court Road for a Nokia mobile, registering a new SIM with the address of a flat in Kensal Rise which had been his temporary home following the split with Natasha. He planned to alternate between the phones, reserving the new number for any conversations or text messages relating to Crane. He would not give it out to any of his friends – not even to Natasha or Holly – for fear that their own phones were compromised.

Holly
. He wanted the opportunity to check her story, to ask her why she had handed over her mother’s files. Was it, as she had insisted at the time, because Katya Levette had admired Charlotte’s reporting, or had there been another, more sinister motive? He simply did not believe Tanya’s claim that Holly was an innocent party.

He called her from the lobby of a vast Gothic hotel on Southampton Row. She was free for dinner, which again aroused his suspicion. Why would a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old actress not be doing something on a Saturday night? Why was Holly Levette always available to see him, even at short notice? It was as if she had been deliberately planted into his life as another pair of eyes, another layer of surveillance to add to Josephine Warner and the spooks of Berlin.

She showed up at his house at half-past eight. Gaddis had spent the early part of the evening carrying the KGB boxes downstairs and piling them at one end of his open-plan kitchen. Holly was wearing a pair of cork-soled platform shoes, a vintage dress from the 1940s and, to judge by the strap of her bra, a set of extremely expensive underwear. She did a double-take when she saw the files blocking the door to Gaddis’s garden and looked at him as if he had gone mad.

‘Spring cleaning?’

‘Research,’ he said. ‘They’re the boxes you gave me. Your mother’s files.’

Her reaction only fed his growing sense of suspicion. Her hands went up to her face, closed together as if in prayer, and she let out a stagey gasp of relief.

‘Thank God you’ve reminded me. I’ve had six of the bloody things clogging up my car for the last two weeks. Do you want them?’

It seemed an uncanny coincidence. ‘There are
more
files?’

‘It’s never ending. We missed about a dozen boxes in the basement when you came over the first time. Next time you stay, will you take them?’

He scanned her face for the lie. Why would she have waited more than a month to offload more information from her mother’s archive? Why now? Had Tanya spoken to her since they had landed at Gatwick? It felt like a plan to test the seriousness of his promise to jettison Crane.

‘I’ll help you carry them in,’ he said.

Holly was parked fifty metres from Gaddis’s front door. The van across the street had disappeared. She unlocked the boot of her car and passed him the first of six small shoeboxes, piling four of them on top of one another so that he was obliged to stagger back into the house with a wobbling column of cardboard secured under his chin.

‘What’s in these?’ he said when he had piled the boxes on the kitchen table.

‘No idea,’ Holly replied.

They managed to avoid the subject for the next two hours, talking instead about Gaddis’s trip to Berlin – ‘A fantastic city. Wish I could have stayed longer.’ – and an audition Holly had done for a part in a new television series – ‘Another bloody medical drama. Why don’t they just turn the BBC into a hospital?’ Towards eleven o’clock, full of wine and conversation, they went to bed. To deny any eavesdropping spooks the dubious pleasure of listening to his pillow talk, Gaddis went into his office, loaded iTunes and slid the volume control beyond halfway.

‘Are you all right?’ Holly asked as he came back into the bedroom. ‘Why are you putting music on?’

‘Thin walls,’ Gaddis replied.

She looked at him. ‘You’re being a bit weird tonight, Sam.’

‘Am I?’

‘Very. Is everything OK?’

‘Everything’s fine.’

He thought of Harold Wilson, of all people, a Prime Minister so convinced that MI5 were out to get him that he resorted to holding sensitive conversations in bathrooms with the taps running. If only he could tell Holly what was going on. If only he could come clean about Meisner, Somers, Charlotte and Crane. Then again, perhaps she already knew all about them. Perhaps he was sleeping with a Russian asset.

‘How did your mother die?’

‘Wow. You really know how to sweet-talk a girl into bed.’

‘Seriously. You’ve never told me. I had the feeling the two of you weren’t close.’

Holly stopped undressing. She was standing barefoot in the middle of his bedroom with a strap of vintage dress halfway down her arm.

‘We had our problems. Mothers and daughters, you know?’

iTunes shuffled to ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’. Gaddis thought about going into his office to change it, but wanted a reply to his question.

‘She had cancer?’ he asked.

‘No. What makes you say that?’

‘I just wondered how she died.’

Holly’s face jagged in irritation. ‘Why the sudden interest?’

She was losing patience. If he wasn’t careful, she would grab her toothbrush from the bathroom, put on her platform shoes and drink-drive back to Chelsea.

‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I asked.’

He did know why he had asked, of course. He wanted to know if the circumstances surrounding the death of Katya Levette had been in any way suspicious. He wanted to know if she had been murdered by the FSB. Was there something in the files that he had not yet discovered, a smoking gun in a shoebox? Had Katya unravelled the riddle of Dresden and paid the price with her life? The theory made no sense, of course: if the Russians had wanted to silence her, they would surely have destroyed her research as well. But Gaddis was in a mood of such persistent suspicion that he could not see the folly of his own thinking.

‘She was an alcoholic.’

Holly’s declaration caught him off-guard. He had been switching off a light in the corridor and had come back into the room to find her sitting on the edge of the bed, unzipping her dress with a melancholy slowness.

‘I didn’t realize.’

‘Why would you?’

He walked across the room and knelt on the ground in front of her. He reached out his hand and stopped her in the act of undressing. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Not your fault,’ she said, smiling and ruffling his hair. He felt embarrassed and guilty. ‘If somebody wants to drink themselves to death, there isn’t much anybody can do about it.’

She continued to take off the dress. It was like an act of defiance against her mother, preventing her from ruining their evening. Gaddis saw the loveliness of her body and reached to touch her stomach. He knew that she had no intention of milking his sympathy, of playing the scene for emotional effect. It was one of the things that he most liked about her: she was an actress entirely incapable of melodrama.

‘Come to bed,’ she said, unbuttoning his shirt. The sweet moisturized scent of her skin was a balm. She began to smile. ‘Just one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Can we
please
turn off the Bob fucking Dylan?’

Three hours later, Gaddis was still awake. Being with Holly had done nothing to calm him. She was asleep in a peaceful curled ball beside him, but he was agitated in a way that he had not known since the worst periods of his divorce. He had barely slept since Berlin, yet the act of closing his eyes seemed to power up his imagination. He was haunted by images of Benedict Meisner, infuriated that he would have to shelve his work on Crane, determined to bring Charlotte’s killers to justice.

At about quarter-past two, abandoning any hope of sleep, he went downstairs, poured himself a glass of wine and – with nothing better to do – began to go through the files which Holly had brought over in the car.

It was the same old story: there was nothing of consequence in any of the boxes. Downing two paracetamol, Gaddis turned his attention to the original files which he had examined only cursorily two months earlier. This time, he found the odd item which he had missed on first examination of the material: Anthony Blunt’s death certificate, for example, and a copy of his Will. There was the transcript of an interview with Sir Dick White, conducted by an unnamed journalist in 1982. Gaddis was briefly intrigued by this, but of course found no reference to ATTILA, nor any mention of Edward Crane. In another box, he found a photocopied obituary of Jack Hewit, the former MI5 officer who had been Guy Burgess’s lover, as well as a newspaper review of Michael Straight’s memoirs. There was also an entire folder dedicated to newspaper cuttings about Goronwy Rees and Vladimir Petrov. Katya had plainly intended to write a book about the relationship between British Intelligence and the KGB in the post-war era, but there was nothing – as far as he could tell – which was not already in the public domain.

Just after four o’clock he poured himself a third glass of wine and smoked a cigarette on the sofa. Holly’s handbag was on the floor at his feet. It was open and some of the contents had spilled out on to the carpet, perhaps when she had retrieved her toothbrush. He was sure that she was asleep; if she woke up wondering what had happened to him, he would be able to hear her footfalls on the staircase. He just wanted to be certain that she was who she said she was. He just wanted to put his mind at rest.

So he reached for the bag.

In the main section he found a well-thumbed copy of
A Doll’s House
, another of
The Time Traveller’s Wife
and an issue of the
NME
. He put all three on the sofa beside him and rummaged deeper. He was amazed by how much noise he was making. He found a broken seashell, an unopened packet of Kleenex, a tangle of headphones, a packet of the contraceptive pill – up-to-date, thank God – and the browned core of a half-eaten apple. He laid these out on the floor. He then found what were surely keepsakes: a small amethyst stone; a length of silk wrapped up into a tight bundle and tied with a piece of string; and a postcard of the Eiffel Tower from Katya Levette, addressed to Holly, postmarked 1999.

What he wanted was her diary. He found it in a separate, zipped-up section of the bag and checked the entries for August and September, looking for anything unusual, for evidence of a double life. But there were just times of auditions, dates of parties, shorthand reminders to buy milk or to pay a bill. His own book launch was marked with the simple note: ‘Gaddis event / Daunt Holland Park’ and their subsequent meetings were also touchingly mundane: ‘Dinner S 830’; ‘S movie Kensington?’; ‘Lunch S Café Anglais’. On the morning of Charlotte’s funeral, Holly had written, in block capitals: ‘SAM FUNERAL CALL HIM!’ and he remembered that she had rung him at the house in Hampstead to make sure that he was all right. He felt wretched for not trusting her.

But still he was not done. Feeling around in the lint and the crumbs at the bottom of the handbag, he found Holly’s wallet and proceeded to unload its contents, item by item, on to the sofa. The credit cards were all in her name. There were frayed photographs of giggling friends in passport booths, loyalty cards to Sainsbury and Tesco, a dry cleaning receipt from a shop on King’s Road and a mini statement from an ATM in Hammersmith. He did not know what he was expecting to find. A number for Sir John Brennan? A business card belonging to Tanya Acocella? On the basis of what he had seen, there was no suggestion that Holly was anything other than an outof-work actress with an overdraft and an erratic social life.

Eventually, he gave up the search and replaced the wallet, more or less as he had found it, in the bag. In a second side pocket he found two sets of keys, a packet of Rizlas, a small tube of lip salve and an electricity bill, in Holly’s name, which was registered to the address in Tite Street. There was also an email from a woman in Australia which Holly had printed on to A4 paper. It was a letter between friends, full of news and gossip, and Gaddis felt ashamed to have read it.

He lit a second cigarette. He replaced the bag on the floor and looked around for Holly’s mobile. It was charging up on a plug beside the kettle. Without removing the flex, he checked her incoming and outgoing calls, her text messages, even the cookies on her Internet browser, but there was nothing at all to arouse his suspicion, only a man called ‘Dan C’ to whom Holly had sent a dismayingly flirtatious text message responding to an invitation to the theatre. It’s no more than I deserve, he thought. At least Dan won’t go through your stuff.