The Trinity Six (3 page)

She was smiling, enjoying the game, promising him something with those huge blue eyes. From the hip pocket of her slim jeans, Holly Levette produced a card which she pressed into his hand. ‘Why don’t you ring me when you’re not so busy?’ she suggested. ‘Why don’t you call and we can arrange for you to come and pick them up?’

‘It’s a good idea.’ Gaddis looked at the card. There was nothing on it except a name and a telephone number. ‘And you say your mother was researching the history of Soviet intelligence?’

‘The KGB, yes.’

A pause. There were so many questions to ask that he could say nothing; if he started, they would never stop. A male colleague from UCL materialized beside Gaddis and stared, with abandon, deep into Holly’s cleavage. Gaddis didn’t bother introducing them.

‘I should go,’ she said, touching his arm as she took a step backwards. ‘It was so lovely to meet you. Your talk was fantastic.’

He shook her hand again, the one with all the rings. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said. ‘And I’ll definitely take you up on that offer.’

‘What offer?’ asked the colleague.

‘Oh, the best kind,’ replied Holly Levette. ‘The best kind.’

Chapter 3

Two days later, on a rain-drenched Saturday morning in August, Gaddis rang the number on the card and arranged to go to Chelsea to pick up the boxes. Five minutes after walking through the door of her flat on Tite Street, he was in bed with Holly Levette. He did not leave until eight o’clock the following evening, the boot of his car sagging under the weight of the boxes, his head and body aching from the sweet carnal impact of a woman who remained, even after all that they had shared, something of a stranger to him, an enigma.

Her flat had been a bombsite, a deep litter field of newspapers, books, back issues of the
New Yorker
, half-finished glasses of wine and ashtrays overflowing with old joints and crushed cigarette packets. The kitchen had three days of washing up piled at the sink, the bedroom more rugs and more clothes strewn over more chairs than Gaddis had ever seen in his life. It reminded him of his own house which, in the years since Natasha had left him, had become a bachelor’s labyrinth of paperbacks, take-away menus and DVD box sets. He had a Belarussian cleaning lady, but she was near-arthritic and spent most her time chatting to him in the kitchen about life in post-Communist Minsk.

Holly’s search for the KGB material had taken them downstairs, to the basement of the apartment block, where Katya Levette had filled a storage cupboard to capacity with dozens of unmarked boxes. It had taken them both more than an hour to locate the files and to carry them outside to Gaddis’s car. Even then, Holly said that she could not be sure that he had taken everything with him.

‘But it’s a start, right?’ she said. ‘It’s something to be getting on with.’

‘Where did all this stuff
come
from?’ he asked.

The sheer volume of material in the basement suggested that Katya Levette had either been extremely well connected in the intelligence firmament or an inveterate hoarder of useless, second-hand information. Gaddis had Googled her, but most of the articles available under her name were either book reviews or hagiographic profiles of middle-ranking business figures in the UK and United States. At no point had she been a staff writer on any recognized publication.

‘Mum was friendly with a lot of Russian ex-pats in London,’ Holly explained. ‘Oligarchs, ex-KGB. You probably know most of them.’

‘Not socially.’

‘And she had a boyfriend once upon a time. Someone in MI6. I think a lot of the stuff may have come from him.’

‘You mean he leaked it?’

Holly nodded and looked away. She was concealing something, but Gaddis did not feel that he knew her well enough to push for more information. There had already been hints of a fraught relationship between mother and daughter; the truth would come out in good time.

He had driven home and put the boxes – fifteen of them – on the floor of Min’s bedroom, making a silent promise to get to them within a few days. And he would have called Holly again almost immediately had it not been for the grim surprise of Monday’s post.

* * *

There were two letters.

The first came in an ominous brown envelope marked
HM

REVENUE
&
CUSTOMS
/
PRIVATE
and was a demand for late payment of tax. A demand for £21,248, to be exact, which was about £21,248 more than Gaddis had in the bank. Failure to pay the sum in full by mid-October, the letter stated, would result in legal action. In the meantime, interest on the debt was accumulating at a rate of 6.5 per cent.

The second letter bore the unmistakable handwriting of his ex-wife, complete with a Spanish postmark and a stain in the left-hand corner which he put down to a wayward cup of
café con leche
.

The letter was typed.

Sergio was the lawyer. Nick was the Barcelona-based boyfriend. Gaddis wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about either of them.

Sam Gaddis wasn’t the sort of man who panicked, but equally he wasn’t the sort of man who had twenty-five thousand quid lying around for random tax bills and school fees. He’d already taken out two separate £20,000 loans to pay off debts accumulated by his divorce; the monthly interest repayments alone amounted to £800, on top of a £190,000 mortgage.

He took the tube to UCL and arranged to meet his literary agent for lunch. It was the only solution. He would have to work his way out of the crisis. He would have to
write
.

They met, two days later, at a small, exorbitantly expensive restaurant on High Street Kensington where the only other clientele were bored Holland Park housewives with lovers half their age and an elderly Greek businessman who took almost an hour to eat a single bowl of risotto.

Robert Paterson, UK director of Dippel, Gordon and Kahla, Literary Agents since 1968, had more important clients than Dr Samuel Gaddis – soap stars, for example, who brought in 15 per cent commissions on six-figure autobiography deals – but none with whom he would rather have spent three hours in an overpriced London restaurant.

‘You mentioned that you had money worries?’ he said as they ordered a second bottle of wine. Paterson was three years off retirement and the sole surviving member of the generation which still believed in the dignity of the three-Martini lunch. ‘Tax?’

‘How did you know?’

‘Always is, this time of year.’ Paterson nodded knowingly as he rounded off a veal cutlet. ‘Most of my clients have less idea how to manage their finances than Champion the Wonder Horse. I get three telephone calls a week from some of them. “Where’s my foreign rights deal? Where’s the cash from the paperback?” I’m not a literary agent any more. I’m a personal financial adviser.’

Gaddis smiled a crooked smile. ‘And what financial advice would you give me?’

‘Depends how much you need.’

‘Twenty-one grand for Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue, payable last Tuesday. Four grand for Min’s school fees. Likely to rise to ten or twenty in the next couple of years unless Natasha’s boyfriend suddenly figures out that being the manager of a successful restaurant in Barcelona doesn’t involve spending three days a week working on his offpiste skiing in the Pyrenees. They’re chucking euros into the Mediterranean.’

‘And UCL can’t help?’

Gaddis thanked the waiter, who had poured more wine into his glass. ‘I’m forty-three. My salary won’t go much higher unless I get Chair. The mortgage alone is costing me a third of what I earn. Short of stealing first editions of
Pride and Prejudice
from the London Library, I’m not looking at raising the money any time soon.’

‘So you need a new deal?’ Paterson dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin.

‘I need a new deal, Bob.’

‘What did I get you last time?’

‘South of five grand.’

Paterson looked mildly embarrassed to have brokered such a meagre contract. He was a huge man, requiring a two-foot gap between his chair and the table. He folded his arms so that they were resting on the summit of his voluminous belly. A Buddha tailored by Savile Row.

‘So we’re talking what? Thirty thousand pounds as a signature advance?’

A small droplet of gravy had appeared at the edge of Paterson’s shirt. Gaddis nodded and his agent produced a stagey sigh.

‘Well, if you want that sort of money quickly, you’ll have to write a strictly commercial book, almost certainly within twelve months and probably under a pseudonym, so that you have the impact of a debut writer. That’s the only way I can get you a serious cheque in today’s market. A historical comparison between Sergei Platov and Peter the Great, God bless you, isn’t going to cut it. With the best will in the world, Sam, nobody really cares about journalists getting bumped off in Russia. Your average punter doesn’t have a clue who Peter the Great is. Does he play for Liverpool? Was he knocked out in the final of
Britain’s Got Talent
? Do you see the problem?’

Gaddis was nodding. He saw the problem. The trouble was, he had no aptitude for forging commercial bestsellers which he could write in twelve months. There were lectures he had given at UCL which had taken him more than a year to research and prepare. For an astonishing moment, during which Paterson was putting on a pair of half-moon spectacles and scanning the pudding menu, he reflected on the very real possibility that he would have to moonlight as a cab driver in order to raise the cash.

Then he remembered Holly Levette.

‘What about the KGB?’

‘What about it?’ Paterson looked up from the menu and did a comic double-take around the restaurant. ‘Are they
here
?’

Gaddis smiled at the joke. A small boy walked past the table and disappeared towards the downstairs bathroom. ‘What about a history of Soviet and Russian intelligence?’ he said. ‘Something with spies in it?’

‘As a series of novels?’

‘If you like.’

Paterson peered over the spectacles, a father suddenly sceptical of a wayward son. ‘I don’t really see you as a novelist, Sam,’ he said. ‘Fiction isn’t your thing. It would take you far too long to complete a manuscript. You should be thinking along the lines of a non-fiction title which can spin off into a TV series, a documentary with you in front of the camera. If you’re serious about making money, you need to start being serious about your image. No future in being a fusty old academic these days. Look at Schama. You have to multi-task. I’ve always said you’d be a natural for television.’

Gaddis hid a thought behind his glass of wine. Maybe it was time. Min was in Barcelona. He was completely broke. What did he have to lose by getting his face on television?

‘Go on, then. Give me the inside take.’

Paterson duly obliged. ‘Well, when it comes to books about Russia, Chechnya is a no-no. Nobody gives a monkey’s.’ He broke off to order ‘just a smidgen of tiramisu, just a
smidgen
’ from the waiter. ‘Ditto Yeltsin, ditto Gorbachev, ditto His Rampaging Egoness, the late lamented Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Done to death. You’ve written about Platov, Chernobyl is old hat, so – yes – you might as well stick to spies. But we’d need poisoned umbrellas, secret KGB plots to knock off Reagan or Thatcher, irrefutable evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lovechild of Rudolf Nureyev and Svetlana Stalin. I’m talking cover of the
Daily Mail
. I’m talking
scoop
.’

The Greek businessman had finally conceded defeat at the hands of his risotto. Gaddis was at once flattered and bemused that Paterson should consider him capable of unearthing a story on that scale. He was also concerned that Holly Levette’s boxes would contain nothing but second-hand, irrelevant dross from dubious sources in the Russian underworld. Right now, though, those boxes were all that he had to go on.

‘I’ll work on it,’ he said.

‘Good.’ Paterson observed the arrival of his tiramisu with a whistle of anticipation. ‘Now. Is there any way I can interest you in a
coffee
?’

Chapter 4

Eight hours later, Gaddis went for supper at the Hampstead house of Charlotte Berg. Berg had been his flatmate at Cambridge and his girlfriend – briefly – before he had been married. She was a former war correspondent who hid the scars of Bosnia, of Rwanda and the West Bank beneath a veneer of bonhomie and slightly fading glamour. Over roast chicken prepared by her husband, Paul, Charlotte began to share details of her latest piece, a freelance story to be sold to the
Sunday Times
which she claimed would be the biggest political scandal of the decade.

‘I’m sitting on a scoop,’ she said.

Gaddis reflected that it was the second time that day that he had heard the word.

‘What kind of scoop?’

‘Well, it wouldn’t be a scoop if I told you, would it?’

This was a game they played. Charlotte and Sam were rivals, in the way that close friends often keep a quiet, competitive eye on one another. The rivalry was professional, it was intellectual and it was almost never taken too seriously.

‘What do you remember about Melita Norwood?’ she asked. Sam looked over at Paul, who was concentratedly mopping up gravy with a hunk of French bread. Norwood was the so-called ‘Granny Spy’, exposed in 1999, who had passed British nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the 1940s and 50s.

‘I remember that she was swept under the carpet. Spied for Stalin, sped up his nuclear programme by about five years, but was allowed to die peacefully in her bed by a British government who didn’t want the negative publicity of trying an eighty-year-old woman for treason. Why?’

Charlotte pushed her plate to one side. She was a gestural, free-spirited woman of vast appetites: for cigarettes, for drink, for information. Paul was the only man she had ever been with who had been able to tolerate her many contradictions. ‘Fuck Melita Norwood,’ she said suddenly, grabbing Sam’s glass of wine by mistake and swallowing most of it.

‘If you say so.’

‘What about Roger Hollis?’ she asked quickly.

‘What about him?’

‘Do you think he was a traitor?’

Sir Roger Hollis was a grey area in the history of British intelligence. In 1981, the journalist Chapman Pincher had published a bestselling book,
Their Trade is Treachery
, in which it was alleged that Hollis, a former head of MI5, had been a KGB spy. Gaddis had read the book as a teenager. He remembered the bright red cover with the shadow of a sickle falling across it; his father asking to borrow it on a seaside holiday in Sussex.

‘To be honest, I haven’t thought about Hollis for a long time,’ he said. ‘Pincher’s allegations were never proved. Is that what you’re working on? Is that the scoop? Is there some kind of connection between Hollis and Norwood? She was associated with a KGB spy codenamed “HUNT” who was never identified. Was HUNT Hollis?’

Charlotte laughed. She was enjoying tapping into Gaddis’s reserves of expertise.

‘Fuck Hollis,’ she said, with the same abrasive glee with which she had dismissed Norwood. Gaddis was bemused.

‘Why do you keep saying that?’

‘Because they were small potatoes. Bit-part players.
Minnows
compared to what I’ve stumbled on.’

‘Which is . . .?’ Paul asked.

Charlotte finished off what must have been her ninth or tenth glass of wine. ‘What if I told you there was a sixth Cambridge spy who had never been unmasked? A contemporary of Burgess and Maclean, of Blunt, Philby and Cairncross, who is still alive today?’

At first, Gaddis couldn’t untangle precisely what Charlotte was telling him. He, too, had drunk at least a bottle of Côtes du Rhône. Hollis a Cambridge spy? Norwood a sixth member of the Ring of Five? Surely she wasn’t working on a crackpot theory like that? But he was a guest in her house, enjoying her hospitality, so he kept his doubts to himself.

‘I’d tell you that you were sitting on a fortune.’

‘This isn’t about
money
, Sam.’ There was no admonishment in Charlotte’s tone, just the bluntness for which she was renowned. ‘This is about
history
. I’m talking about a legendary KGB spy, codenamed ATTILA, who matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. A man every bit as dangerous and as influential as Maclean and Philby. A mole at the heart of Britain’s political and intelligence infrastructure whose treason has been deliberately covered up by the British government for more than fifty years.’

‘Jesus.’ Gaddis tried to hide his scepticism. It surely wasn’t plausible that a sixth member of the Trinity ring had escaped detection. Every spook and academic and journalist with the slightest interest in the secret world had been hunting the sixth man for decades. Any Soviet defector, at any point after 1945, could have blown ATTILA’s cover at the drop of a hat. At the very least, Cairncross or Blunt would have given him up at the time of their exposure.

‘Where are you getting your information?’ he asked. ‘Why was there no mention of ATTILA in Mitrokhin?’

Vasili Mitrokhin was a major in the KGB who passed detailed accounts of Russian intelligence operations to MI6 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The documents were published in the UK in 1992.

‘Everybody thinks the entire history of Soviet espionage was contained in Mitrokhin.’ Charlotte lit a cigarette and looked utterly content. ‘But there was a
ton
of stuff he didn’t get his hands on. Including this.’

Paul put his knife and fork together. Charlotte’s husband was a tall, patient man, impassive to the point of diffidence. A successful City financier – hence the seven-figure, five-bedroom house in Hampstead – he loved Charlotte not least because she allowed him to blend into the background, to maintain the privacy he had worked so hard to protect. He was so inscrutable that Sam could never work out whether Paul viewed him as a threat to their marriage or as a valued friend. It was almost a surprise when he joined the fray, saying:

‘Come on, who’s your source?’

Charlotte leaned forward into an effectively conspiratorial cloud of cigarette smoke and looked at both men in turn. Her husband was the only person she could entirely trust with the information. Gaddis was a loyal friend, of course, a man of tact and discretion, but he also possessed a streak of mischievousness which made sharing a secret like this extremely risky.

‘Stays between these four walls, OK?’ she said, so that Gaddis was aware of what it meant to her. He felt a sudden thrust of envy, because she seemed so convinced of her prize.

‘Of course. Four walls. Won’t breathe a word.’

‘Can I tell Polly?’ Paul muttered, placing his hand on Charlotte’s back as he stood to clear the plates. Polly was their arthritic black Labrador and, in the absence of any children, their most cherished companion.

‘This is serious,’ she said. ‘I’m sworn to secrecy. But it’s so mind-boggling I can’t keep my mouth shut.’

Gaddis felt a historian’s excitement at the prospect of what Charlotte had uncovered. The sixth man. Was it really
possible
? It was like finding Lucan. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Let me start at the beginning.’ Charlotte filled another glass of wine. Paul caught Sam’s eye and frowned imperceptibly. She was a functioning alcoholic: a bottle of wine at lunch, two at dinner; gins at six; a couple of tumblers of Laphroaig last thing at night. None of it ever seemed to affect her behaviour beyond a certain decibel increase in the volume of her voice. But the booze was undoubtedly beating her: it was putting years on, adding weight, black-bagging her eyes. ‘About a month ago I received a letter from a man called Thomas Neame. He claims to be the confidant of a British diplomat who spent his entire career, from World War II to the mid-1980s, working as a spy for the KGB. I made some basic enquiries, discovered that Thomas was kosher, and went to meet him.’

‘Went where?’ Paul was oblivious to the comings-and-goings of his wife’s career. Often she would disappear for weeks on end, pursuing a story in Iraq, in California, in Moscow.

‘That’s secret number one,’ Charlotte replied. ‘I can’t tell even
you
where Thomas Neame lives.’

‘Trust is such a wonderful thing between husband and wife,’ Gaddis muttered. ‘How old is this guy?’

‘Ninety-one.’ Charlotte gulped more wine. Her skin had darkened under the low lights of the kitchen, her mouth now ruby red with lipstick and wine. ‘But ninety-one going on seventy-five. You wouldn’t fancy taking him on in an arm wrestle. Very tough and fit, sort of war generation Scot who can smoke forty a day and still pop to the top of Ben Nevis before breakfast.’

‘Unlike someone else I know,’ said Paul pointedly, looking at the cigarette in his wife’s hand. Charlotte’s years of reporting overseas had weakened, rather than strengthened, what had once been an iron constitution. Both Paul and Gaddis worried about this but could no more have curtailed her lifestyle than they could have biked to the moon.

‘And how does Neame know that his friend was a spy?’ Gaddis asked. ‘How come it hasn’t leaked out before?’

His phone rang before Charlotte had a chance to respond. Gaddis plucked it from the pocket of his jacket and looked at the display. It was a text from Holly Levette.

NIGHTCAP . . .?

He was possessed by two contradictory impulses: to polish off his wine as quickly as possible and to grab a taxi south to Tite Street; or to come clean to Charlotte about his quest for a headline-grabbing story of his own.

‘Do you know this woman?’ he said, holding up the phone, as if there was a photograph of Holly on the screen. ‘Holly Levette?’

‘Rings a bell.’

‘Mother’s name was Katya. She was working on a history of the KGB when—’

‘Katya Levette!’ Charlotte reacted with mock horror. She shook her head and said: ‘Commonly regarded as the world’s worst hack.’

‘How so?’

She waved a hand in front of her face. ‘Not worth going into. Our paths crossed once or twice. She was constantly telling me how wonderful I was, but clearly looking for a quid pro quo. I think her daughter sent me an email after she died, saying how much Katya had admired something I’d written about Chechnya. Then offered me a load of old junk from her research papers.’

‘A load of old junk,’ Gaddis repeated, with a thump of despair.

‘Well, not junk.’ Charlotte looked sheepish. ‘Actually, I palmed her off on you. Told her to give them to a proper historian.’

‘Gee thanks.’

‘And now she’s been in touch?’

Gaddis nodded. ‘She didn’t mention that I was getting them second-hand. She told me how much she’d admired my
Guardian
article about Sergei Platov.’

Paul smothered a laugh. ‘Flattery will get you everywhere.’

Gaddis poured himself a glass of wine. Skirting around the dirty weekend in Chelsea, he explained that Holly had come to Daunt Books and offered him the KGB material on a plate.

‘A beautiful girl turns up like that, willing to hand over several hundred documents about Soviet intelligence, you don’t exactly turn a blind eye. How was I to know Katya was a fruitcake?’

‘Oh, she’s beautiful, is she?’ Charlotte asked, animated by the opportunity to tease him. ‘You never said.’

‘Holly is
very
beautiful.’

‘And she came to the launch? How come I didn’t meet her?’

‘Probably because you’d told her to get stuffed,’ Paul replied.

Charlotte laughed and picked at a chunk of candle wax on the table. ‘And now this girl is texting you at half-past ten at night. Is there something you’re not telling the group, Doctor Gaddis? Does Miss Levette need a bedtime story?’

Gaddis took a Camel from her open packet. ‘You’re lucky,’ he said, deliberately changing the subject. ‘Right now I’d sell my grandchildren for your Cambridge story.’ He lit the cigarette from the candle. Paul grimaced and waved a hand in front of his face, saying: ‘Christ, not you as well.’

‘The sixth man? Why?’

‘Financial problems.’ Gaddis made a gesture with upturned hands. ‘Nothing new.’

There was a strange kind of shame in being broke at forty-three. How had it come to this? He took the cigarette smoke deep into his lungs and exhaled at the ceiling.

Charlotte frowned. ‘Alimony? Is the fragrant Natasha turning out to be not quite as fragrant as we thought?’

Paul poured water into a cafetière of coffee and kept his counsel.

‘Tax bill. School fees. Debts,’ Gaddis replied. ‘I need to raise about twenty-five grand. Had lunch with my agent today. He says the only hope I have of working my way out of the situation is to write a hack job about Soviet intelligence. Doesn’t even have to be under my own name. So a sixth Cambridge spy is the perfect story. In fact, I’ll steal it off you. Bury you under the floorboards to get my hands on it.’

Charlotte looked genuinely concerned. ‘You don’t have to
steal
it,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you co-write a book with me? We can even use some of Katya’s magic files.’ Paul grinned. ‘Seriously. I’ll break the Cambridge story as an exclusive, but after that someone will want a book. You’d be
perfect
. I don’t have the patience to sit down and compose two hundred thousand words about a piece I’ve already written. I’ll want to move on to the next thing. But you could put ATTILA in context. You could add all the juice and flavour. Nobody knows more about Russia than you do.’

Gaddis declined outright. It would feel wrong to be piggybacking on Charlotte’s triumph. She was drunk and the booze was making promises she might not, in the cold light of morning, be willing to keep. Yet she persisted.

‘Sleep on it,’ she said. ‘Christ, sleep on it while you’re sleeping with Holly Levette.’ Paul plunged the coffee. ‘I’d
love
to work with you. It would be an honour. And it sounds as though it will get you out of a nasty situation.’

Gaddis slotted his mobile phone back in his jacket pocket and took Charlotte’s hand. ‘It’s an idea,’ he said. ‘No more than that. You’re incredibly kind. But let’s talk more in the morning.’

‘No. Let’s talk
now
.’ She wouldn’t let pride and British etiquette stand in the way of a good idea. Polly, her buckled legs seized by arthritis, came hobbling into the kitchen and lay at her feet. Charlotte leaned over and fed a piece of bread into her mouth, saying: ‘Do
you
think it’s a good idea, Pol?’ in a voice for a child. ‘
I
think it’s a good idea.’