‘You must stop your act,’ Grek told him. ‘It deteriorates you in my eyes. I have come today to warn you that if you speak again to any member of the media or to any individual in any capacity whatsoever about Edward Crane, there will be grave consequences in terms of our arrangement.’ Grek saw that Somers was about to speak but raised his hand to silence him. ‘Enough,’ he said, screwing the cigarette into the path with the toe of his shoe. ‘Next time, the gentlemen who visit you will be considerably less polite than I am. Next time, for example, they may ask you to return the twenty thousand pounds which we paid for your silence. Your silence, Calvin. Do I make myself understood?’
‘You do,’ said Somers. All of his bravado had fallen away in the intense relief of knowing that he was forgiven and would soon be free to return home. ‘Of course you do.’
‘Good.’
‘And can I just say that I didn’t mean to cause any trouble—’
But Alexander Grek had already turned and was walking back towards his Mercedes, leaving Calvin Somers talking to the space where he had been standing, a space which now buzzed with insects in a back-lit haze of seeds and pollen. The nurse felt a bubble of relief rise in his stomach and almost jogged to the edge of the field, sweat on his vest cooling in the evening air so that he was obliged to put on the fleece to keep warm.
The field was a great expanse of dusty, harvestable corn which opened up his mood and gave him the time and the confidence to think more clearly. He was free. He had been caught, but the Russians had given him a second chance. He walked along the perimeter of the field, emboldened by this thought and was very soon imagining the glass of Wolf Blass Chardonnay he was going to pour himself, perhaps even the packet of cigarettes - ten, not twenty - that he would buy at the garage near his flat. He craved a cigarette. Something to batten down the last of his nerves.
Ten minutes earlier, the two FSB officers who had driven to the Mount Vernon Hospital with Alexander Grek had waited until their boss was out of sight before locking the Mercedes and crossing the main road. The first man, whose name was Karl Stieleke, had walked three hundred metres west before entering the woods and circling back towards the path where Grek and Somers had been talking. The second man, whose name was Nicolai Doronin, had walked in an easterly direction from the car park until he had found himself at the end of a dusty farm track which circled the Heath. Stieleke had waited beneath a chestnut tree, listening to Grek’s interrogation. He now tracked Calvin Somers in the last of the evening light as the nurse walked along the edge of the cornfield, heading towards his home in Harefield.
Somers became aware that he was being followed when he reached the perimeter of a large wood, about half a mile from the hospital. It was necessary to go through the wood in order to reach his house; there was no short-cut, no other way around. He turned and saw a man in his late twenties wearing a pair of jeans and a polo shirt. The man was not accompanied by a dog, nor did he look like the type to be taking a walk in the countryside on a late summer evening. He was almost certain that the man was Russian.
So Calvin Somers panicked. He knew that there was a gate into the woods, and a path, but it was at least a hundred metres away, so he tried to climb over the fence which ran around the wood and caught his fleece on a stretch of barbed wire in the process. As it tore, he swore under his breath, looking back to check if he was still being followed. The Russian had disappeared. Somers was standing in dense undergrowth, with no way of hiding nor of reaching any of the paths in the wood without cutting and scratching himself on a wall of thorns and bushes. He was, in effect, trapped. So, with an odd sense of embarrassment, he decided to climb back over the fence and to return to the field. It would be safer out in the open, he told himself. Somebody might walk past and see him.
That person was Nicolai Doronin. Guided by Stieleke on a mobile phone, Doronin had jogged around the northern edge of the cornfield and completed a pincer movement by circling back towards the woods into which Somers had just disappeared. Somers saw him as he clambered back over the fence, gingerly holding his fleece, and almost waved in relief. This man looked more local: he was shaven-headed and wearing a shell-suit and a pair of expensive-looking trainers. Somewhere, in the depths of the field, he probably had a Bull Mastiff or a Doberman busily chasing rabbits.
Then Somers looked to his right. The Russian was suddenly beside him, and springing at him like a cat. Somers was on the ground before he realized that the second man, the shell-suit, was also there, close in against the fence, and he felt an awful, irretrievable shame as he let them go about their business. In a sense, he had been expecting this and still believed, in some vague, hopeful way, that it would just be a beating, just a lesson from the FSB, a few kicks to the stomach, a blow to the head, maybe a black eye at work for a couple of weeks.
After a minute or so, however, Calvin Somers knew that it wasn’t going to end. He felt a warmth in his body which was more than sweat and realized that something wasn’t right in his stomach. One of the men had used a blade on him. He started to beg them to stop and hated himself for pleading, but it was all that he could do. It was all that he had ever done. Were they going through his pockets? Was one of them going through his bag? It seemed as though only one of the men was left now and that he was the one who had done all the damage. Was that right? Somers couldn’t focus. The blood in his gut was turning cold and he wondered about the woods. If he could just get into the woods again, maybe back on to the path. If he could get away, all this would stop happening.
But it would never stop. Somers knew that he wasn’t ever going to stand up again. Had they meant to go this far? Had they meant to kill him?
He shouldn’t have talked to Charlotte Berg. He knew that now, just as he knew that he was never going to make it back home. And he passed in and out of consciousness with the sorry realization that she, too, had been murdered by these men. Why hadn’t he realized that Charlotte Berg hadn’t died of a heart attack?
He wondered if her friend knew, the academic. What was his name? For some reason, Somers couldn’t remember. He wondered if he should get a message to him, to somehow let him know that his friend had been killed. Somers tried to reach for his phone but found that it had disappeared.
Sam Gaddis. That was it. Gaddis. He should try to call him. He should try to get in touch. Somebody needed to let this guy know that the things he was getting himself involved in were going to get him killed.
Chapter 17
There was a seven-mile traffic jam on the M3 out of Winchester, which gave Gaddis all the time he needed to digest what Neame had told him about Eddie Crane’s year at Oxford. If true, it was an astonishing story.
In the summer of his graduation from Cambridge, Crane had been instructed by his NKVD handler, Arnold Deutsch, to apply for a postgraduate position at Oxford. Moscow’s requirements were simple: Crane was to spend a year talent-spotting Communists whom he felt had the potential to work as agents for the Soviet Union. In other words, he was to perform the same job that Burgess had done, to such great effect, in the earlier part of the decade at Trinity.
Crane’s controller at Oxford was a man named Theodore Maly, an undercover Soviet intelligence officer. Maly had already succeeded in recruiting Arthur Wynn, a former student at Trinity, to the Soviet cause. According to Neame, ATTILA and Wynn had succeeded in penetrating Oxford’s left-wing community and had effectively green-lit a ring of at least seven spies which, it transpired, had been every bit as successful as their counterparts at Cambridge. For Gaddis, this wasn’t just a major development in the Crane story; it was a huge scoop in its own right. An Oxford Ring had always been one of the great conspiracy theories of the Cold War. He now had evidence that such a ring had existed.
Yet that wasn’t the end of it. What Neame had told him about the identity of one of the members of the Oxford Ring was little short of astonishing. Crane’s memoirs apparently contained a cryptic reference to a Modern History under graduate from Yorkshire named ‘James’ who had been tal
ent-spotted by ATTILA and subsequently recruited as an agent by the Soviets in 1938. Russian Intelligence had given ‘James’ the code name AGINCOURT. In the memoirs, Crane had revealed that AGIN-COURT had gone on to hold ‘one of the highest offices in the land’. Gaddis was convinced that this was the revelation that Charlotte had referred to at dinner in Hampstead three weeks earlier: a secret which would ‘rock London and Moscow to their foundations’. Neame had insisted that he did not know AGINCOURT’s identity, but Gaddis felt certain that, with enough time, he would be able to put the clues together and, at the very least, draw up a shortlist of suspects.
There were three days until his next scheduled meeting with Neame. Gaddis used the time to find out what was already in the public domain about Arthur Wynn. He also turned his attention to Oxford in the pre-war years. In his memoirs, Spycatcher, the former MI5 officer Peter Wright had raised the possibility of an Oxford Ring, identifying the academic Jennifer Hart, the Labour MP Bernard Floud and his brother, Peter, as suspected members. According to Neame, all three names appeared in Crane’s memoirs as active Soviet agents.
What intrigued Gaddis was that several suspects in the Oxford Ring had died in suspicious circumstances; one had even taken her life shortly after being interrogated by MI5. This had prompted the Security Service to suspend its investigations and to cover up the existence of the Oxford Ring for fear of a public scandal. But was Peter Wright’s version of events true, or a clever attempt to create a smokescreen not only for ATTILA and Wynn, but also for AGINCOURT?
That night, Gaddis went to the Donmar Warehouse theatre with Holly to watch a new play written by a friend with whom she had been at university.
‘You look bored,’ she said at the interval. ‘You look distracted.’
She was right. He couldn’t concentrate on the production. He wanted to walk out, to take Holly to dinner and tell her about Neame and Lampard, about ‘James’ and the Oxford spy ring. But it was impossible; he could not involve her. If he was honest with himself, he still did not know why Holly had approached Charlotte with her mother’s research papers. Had it just been a coincidence, or had Katya Levette in some way been involved in the Crane conspiracy? His mind was scrambled with possibilities.
The barman at the Donmar was a friend of Holly’s, an outof-work actor called Piers whose girlfriend was performing in the play. Afterwards, the four of them went for dinner in Covent Garden and he found that he enjoyed their company, and that Piers, in particular, was easygoing and likeable. But a part of him was floating through the meal, killing time until he was able to get home and attack the books once again. He persuaded Holly to spend the night at his house but left her asleep in his bed while he went to his office and trawled the Internet looking for information about AGINCOURT. All he was able to dig up was an old conspiracy theory about the former British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, working for the Soviet Union. Had Neame sent him on a wild-goose chase?
On Thursday morning he set off for Winchester, following the instructions that Neame had given him when they left the cathedral. He was to return to Waterstone’s and to wait for Peter on the first floor. This time, they had joked, there would be no need to carry a copy of the Herald Tribune.
Peter duly appeared at 11 a.m. wearing a red Manchester United shirt with ‘ROONEY’ emblazoned across the back. They were alone in the room and Gaddis laughed when he saw the shirt, Peter grinning back and handing him a small box and a piece of paper on which he had written a set of instructions.
‘Sat-nav,’ he said. ‘It’s already switched on. Just press the green button and do what it tells you. Your friend is waiting in the pub.’
Gaddis opened the box and found a small TomTom loosely wrapped in bubble plastic. The written instructions explained that he was to take the route pre-programmed into the sat-nav, a journey which would eventually lead to a village outside Winchester. Peter would be following Gaddis’s car at a discreet distance to ensure that he was not being tailed. If, at any point, he suspected that Gaddis was under surveil-lance, he would text the word ‘LONDON’ to his mobile phone, thereby aborting the meeting.
The plan seemed straightforward and, by now, Gaddis was familiar enough with the eccentric customs of the secret world to be neither surprised nor concerned by it. He returned to his car, put the TomTom on the passenger seat, switched on the engine and pressed ‘Go’.
‘At the end of the road, turn left.’
He was startled to hear the voice of Sean Connery, preprogrammed into the software. Another of Peter’s private jokes; Gaddis was beginning to like him. Pulling out into shuffling late-morning traffic, he was soon being slung around the narrow lanes and B-roads of southern Hampshire by an actor doing his very best impression of Commander James Bond. Peter had programmed the sat-nav with a series of turns and loops which often brought Gaddis back to a roundabout or junction that he had passed five or ten minutes earlier. The purpose of this was clear: any vehicle attempting to follow him would quickly be exposed. Gaddis kept an eye on his rear-view mirror, certain that Peter was driving a red Toyota. It would appear, six or seven cars back, on dual carriageways and at sets of traffic lights, and Gaddis found himself slowing down at regular intervals to allow him the chance to catch up.
When he had been on the road for almost half an hour, a text message came through on Gaddis’s phone. He reached for it and saw with a feeling of dread that the message had come from a ‘Withheld’ number. To his relief, though, Peter was simply instructing him to switch off the phone, doubtless to prevent it being tracked to the pub. Within five minutes, the sat-nav had brought him into the car park of a mock-Tudor inn in the village of Easton, just a few miles north of Winchester.
Neame was already seated in the corner of the dining room, far enough from neighbouring tables that their conversation would not be overheard. He was wearing the same tweed suit, the same wool tie and the same polished brown brogues that he had sported at their first meeting. It was almost as if he had walked directly from Winchester and had been waiting in the pub ever since. There was a pint of what looked like real ale in front of him and he appeared to be in jovial spirits.
‘Ah. The good doctor.’
Neame rose to his feet.
‘Is this your local, Tom?’
The old man’s hand was soft and damp as Gaddis shook it. His walking stick was resting in the crook of the wall behind his chair and he still carried about him the same smell of lavender which had drifted between the pews of Winchester Cathedral.
‘There’s a tunnel from the nursing home. Certain residents refer to it as the Great Escape. How’s Peter?’
Gaddis considered mentioning the Rooney shirt, but thought better of it.
‘I didn’t know he was such a joker,’ he replied instead. ‘Sent me here with Sean Connery as a tour guide.’
‘I’m not sure that I follow you.’
Gaddis privately conceded that it was an unhelpful way to have started the interview and spent the next three minutes trying to explain that actors’ voices could be downloaded on to sat-navs via the Internet. Neame looked utterly baffled. The ‘good doctor’ might as well have been speaking in Swahili.
‘I really don’t understand all this new-fangled technology,’ he said. ‘Peter’s the one who keeps himself up-to-date. I’m very lucky to have him.’
‘Where did you find him?’ Gaddis asked, because it wasn’t every day that a ninety-one-year-old resident of an old people’s home had an expert in counter-surveillance at his beck and call.
‘State secret,’ Neame replied, tapping the side of his nose. His mood was relaxed and amenable. He looked well-rested, not a day older than seventy-five. ‘Let’s just say that Eddie introduced us shortly before he went into hiding.’
There was something too convenient in this answer, but Gaddis was certainly not going to accuse Neame of lying. It was perfectly possible that the two men were still in regular contact and that Crane was using Neame as a willing go-between, drip-feeding informa
tion as and when it suited him. Equally, Crane could have hired Peter from the private sector to give his old friend an extra layer of protection.
‘Talking of new-fangled technology,’ Gaddis said, ‘would you mind if I took your photograph?’
Neame hesitated. ‘In principle, no, but it must only be for the book. You mustn’t show the picture to anybody before publication. That’s absolutely vital for my security.’
‘I understand,’ Gaddis replied with a smile.
It was a cynical move, not least because he planned to take the picture with nothing more sophisticated than the camera on his mobile phone. No lights, no make-up, just a shot of Crane’s best friend drinking a pint in an English pub. He was rather touched as the old man steadied himself, adjusted his jacket and flattened down his hair, then held a steady gaze as Gaddis lined up the shot.
‘Don’t say cheese.’
The photograph looked perfectly good, but Gaddis took a couple more for luck. Every meeting with Neame could be his last; he might never have the same opportunity again.
‘Can we talk a little more about Oxford?’ he said, when he had put the phone away. He had ordered a pint of lager from the bar and had a list of questions to get through before Neame grew tired.
‘Of course.’
‘I’m still interested in the identity of AGINCOURT.’
‘Aren’t we all.’
‘In Spycatcher, Peter Wright suggests that—’
Neame did not even allow him to complete the sentence.
‘For goodness’ sake, Sam. Please don’t take anything that man says seriously. Wright was an absolute charlatan. Eddie couldn’t stand him. Always playing people off against one another. Obsessed by money, obsessed by petty vengeance. If the government had handled Peter with even a modicum of common sense, he would have evaporated into anonymity.’
‘So you knew Wright as well?’
Neame looked confused. ‘Did I know him?’
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