The Trinity Six (2011)

by Charles Cumming

‘There’s a contact there who I’d like to talk to.’

  ‘Somebody who was working for the Russians during the war?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Josephine straightened the napkin in her lap.

  ‘My sister lives in Berlin.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Moved there two years ago. I still haven’t been to visit.’

  Looking up from his plate, with a mixture of surprise and delight, Gaddis realized that Josephine was presenting him with the opportunity to invite her to Germany.

  ‘Maybe I should look her up when I go over,’ he suggested.

  ‘She’s trouble,’ Josephine replied and Gaddis was sure that he caught a flash of jealousy in her eyes.

  However, this proved to be the high tide of their flirtatious rapport. By eleven o’clock, Gaddis had paid the bill and they had walked north towards Goldhawk Road, where Josephine’s behaviour changed markedly. Within seconds she had flagged down a cab, aware perhaps that they were both a little drunk, both attracted to one another and, in different circumstances, might easily have succumbed to a late-night pavement clinch.

  ‘I had fun tonight,’ she said, ducking into the back seat after kissing Gaddis cursorily on the cheek.

  ‘I enjoyed it, too,’ he replied, surprised by how quickly Josephine had cut off the romantic possibilities of the evening. He concluded that she was returning to the ‘complicated’ love life that she had referred to at the beginning of dinner.

  ‘Got to be up at five,’ she explained and waved briefly through the rear window of the cab as it pulled away towards Chiswick. Gaddis had known dates like this before and wondered if he would see her again. She had promised to ‘dig up’ a photograph of Edward Crane at Kew, but they had crossed a professional and personal boundary tonight and he suspected that she would pass the job to a colleague, to avoid any unnecessary complications. Perhaps he was being unduly pessimistic, but there had been something in Josephine’s manner as they walked away from the restaurant which had seemed to shut down any possibility of a relationship. Throughout the meal, she had been unquestionably seductive, raising oblique prospects of further meetings - movies, lunches, even Berlin - but that playfulness had disappeared once he had paid the bill. It was a pity, because he liked her. Walking home through a criss-cross of dimly lit residential streets, he realized that it had been a long time since a woman had crept under his skin like Josephine Warner.

  Chapter 23

  Two days later, Gaddis was sifting through his mail at the start of the new term at UCL when he turned up an A4-sized manila envelope with a Greek postmark.

  Inside, he found a handwritten note on monogrammed paper from Charles Crane.

  What a wonderful surprise to speak to you on the telephone yesterday. I’ve managed to track down a couple of photographs of Uncle Eddie. One taken during the war and another at my mother’s house in Berkshire in the late 1970s (possibly ‘80 or even ‘81). If memory serves, Eddie had just retired from the Foreign Office and was about to take up a position on the Board of Deutsche Bank in West Berlin.

  When you’re finished with them, could I ask that you send them back to the address above? I would be most grateful.

  Gaddis pulled out the photographs, his hand snagging on the envelope in his enthusiasm to see them. At last he was going to set eyes on Edward Crane.

  The picture from the war was a formal, black-and-white portrait of a soldier in full uniform. It was mounted on a frayed square of greying cardboard and signed and dated ‘1942’ in near-illegible blue ink. Crane was in his early thirties, with brooding, saturnine features and thick black hair which had been carefully combed, parted to one side and run through with oil. It was not the face that Gaddis had been expecting; in his imagination, Crane had been a less physically imposing figure, slim and cunning, perhaps even a touch effete. This Crane was a bruiser, tough and thick-set. It was difficult to imagine that the man in the photograph had possessed the subtlety to hoodwink intelligence services on both sides of the Iron Curtain for more than fifty years. And why the soldier’s uniform? At the time the photograph was taken, Crane would most probably have been working in counter-espionage at MI5, passing the names of potential Soviet defectors to Theodore Maly. Gaddis concluded that Crane had perhaps worn a soldier’s uniform while assisting Cairncross at Bletchley.

  The second photograph was a close-up Polaroid taken in a hazy, sun-filled English garden. The hair was still carefully tended, but thinner now and white as chalk. Gaddis was reminded of pictures of the older W.H. Auden because Crane’s face was craggy and tanned, loose about the neck. Calvin Somers had described his skin as looking ‘too healthy’ for a man suffering from pancreatic cancer, but perhaps he had been referring to the colour and texture of Crane’s face, rather than to his apparent youthfulness. The nose, he noted, was flushed, either with wine or sunburn - Gaddis couldn’t tell - and the smile was broad and energetic; this time you could see the charm of the master spy. Gaddis felt relieved, because this second image conformed far more closely to his mental picture of Crane. Furthermore, it put to rest any lingering doubts he might have possessed that Crane and Neame were the same person. It was not difficult, for example, to imagine the man in the photograph as an avuncular figure passing himself off as a patrician banker in Berlin; at the same time, Crane’s face had a bohemian quality, the eyes betraying a wild streak bordering on the eccentric. Gaddis could only guess at the secrets stacked up behind those eyes, five decades of bluff and counter-bluff, culminating in the mysteries of Dresden.

  He was not to know that Charles Crane did not exist. The man Gaddis had spoken to on the telephone was one Alistair Chapman, a colleague of Sir John Brennan’s from an era in which the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service had been a mid-level officer operating in Cold War Vienna. Chapman had agreed to allow SIS to divert an Athens phone number to his London home and to masquerade as Crane’s nephew as a favour to Brennan. The Chief had been delighted with his performance.

  ‘Thank you, Alistair,’ he had said, speaking to Chapman that evening. ‘I doubt that in the long history of the Secret Intelligence Service we have ever employed a more distinguished backstop.’

  The photographs that Charles Crane had supposedly posted to Gaddis were, in fact, pictures of a former SIS officer named Anthony Kitto, who had died in 1983. Brennan had simply dug them up from an archive and placed them in the envelope. Gaddis, of course, was none the wiser, and even made a mental note to write Crane a letter of thanks as he turned to his other post.

  There was a letter from a colleague in America, a postcard of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia signed by Min and, at the bottom of the pile, a bank statement from Barclays. He was in the habit of throwing away correspondence from the myriad organizations to which he owed money, but on this occasion he glanced at the statement and was surprised to see that his balance was healthier than he had imagined. Over a month after he had handed Calvin Somers a cheque for PS2000, the money had still not been cashed. The cheque had been post-dated, but at least two weeks had passed in which Somers could have presented it to his bank.

  Gaddis was confronted by a dilemma. He could cross his fingers and hope that Somers had forgotten about the cheque, but it was hopeless to think that a man as grasping and as manipulative as that would simply forget he was sitting on two grand. More likely Somers had lost the cheque and would come asking for a replacement in three or four weeks’ time. The last thing Gaddis needed was somebody asking him for two grand in the run-up to Christmas. By then, any cheque he wrote would almost certainly bounce. He ran through the address book in his mobile phone, found the number of the Mount Vernon Hospital and called Somers’s office.

  The call was diverted to the main switchboard. Gaddis was fairly sure that the woman who answered was the same bored, impatient receptionist who had brushed him off in September.

  ‘Could you put me through to Calvin Somers, please? I’m having difficulty getting him on his direct line.’

  There w
as an audible intake of breath. It was definitely the same woman; she sounded irritated even by this modest request.

  ‘Can I ask who’s speaking, please?’

  ‘Sam Gaddis. It’s a personal call.’

  ‘Could you hold?’

  Before Gaddis had a chance to say ‘Of course’, the line went dead and he was left holding the receiver, wondering if the connection had been lost. Then, just as he was on the point of hanging up and re-dialling, a man picked up, coughing to clear his throat.

  ‘Mr Gaddis?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re looking for Calvin?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Gaddis heard the awful hollow pause which precedes bad news.

  ‘Could I ask what your relationship was with him?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I understand the question.’ Gaddis instinctively knew that something was wrong, and regretted sounding obstructive. ‘Calvin was helping me with some research on an academic thesis. I’m a lecturer at UCL. Is everything all right?’

  ‘I am very sorry to tell you that Calvin has been involved in a terrible incident. He was mugged on his way home from work. Attacked, you might say. I’m surprised you didn’t see the reports in the newspapers. The police are treating it as murder.’

  Chapter 24

  Gaddis was standing in the same room in which he had learned of Charlotte’s death, but his reaction on this occasion was quite different. He hung up the phone, turned towards the shelves of books which lined one side of his cramped office and experienced a sensation of pure fear. For a long time he was almost motionless, his stalled brain trying to deny the inescapable logic of what he had been told. If Calvin Somers had been murdered, Charlotte had most probably been killed by the same assailants. That meant that his own life was in danger and that Neame and Ludmilla Tretiak were also threatened. Gaddis found that he began to think about himself in the third person, as an entity separate and distinct from his own familiar, protected existence; it was some kind of brain trick, an atavistic impulse to deny the truth of his predicament. But the truth was inescapable. Whoever had killed Somers would now surely direct their attention towards him.

  He continued to stare blankly at the bookshelves, his eyes jumping from spine to spine. Should he go to the police? Could he claim that Charlotte had been murdered? Who would believe him? There had been no evidence of foul play at the house in Hampstead. Charlotte had a weak heart and an unhealthy lifestyle; that was it. Besides, she had been cremated; it was too late to carry out an autopsy. Gaddis did not know why Somers had been killed or who had perpetrated the act. His best guess was Russian intelligence, but why murder a man simply for knowing that Edward Crane’s death had been faked by MI6? The British themselves might be involved, but would they kill one of their own citizens simply for breaking the terms of the Official Secrets Act? It didn’t seem likely.

  He tried to clear his mind. He tried to be logical. Fact: the Russian espiocracy was systematically eradicating anybody with links to ATTILA. But if that was the case, why had the embassy in London given him a tourist visa ten days earlier, no questions asked, allowing him to pass unchecked through Sheremetyevo? This small thought offered Gaddis a brief moment of solace until he realized that there was every chance the FSB could have deliberately allowed him to fly into Russia in order to follow him around Moscow and to isolate his contacts. If that was the case, he would have led them straight to Ludmilla. Turning from the bookshelves, he opened the window of his office, inhaled a lungful of dank London air and stared up at a black, pre-rain sky. It felt as though he had no moves left; the conspiracy was too large, the main players either dead or far beyond his reach. Who could he talk to who might be able to shed light on what was happening?

  Neame.

  Gaddis grabbed his jacket and bag, locked his office and took the Tube to Waterloo. He called Peter from a phone box near the ticket hall but the number still wasn’t picking up. A Winchester train, scheduled for 11.39, was sitting on Platform 6, adjacent to a Guildford service which departed five minutes later. With what he hoped would be a successful tactic for shaking off any surveillance, Gaddis walked on to the Guildford train, sat on a fold-down chair beside the automatic doors, then moved quickly across the platform at 11.38 to join the Winchester service. He was not able to determine whether or not he had been followed, but the train moved off within thirty seconds and he sat back in his seat with the dawning realization that his life was about to take on a quality of evasion and trickery for which he was far from prepared.

  An hour later he was trying Peter again from a phone box outside Winchester station. This time, he picked up. The sound of his voice felt like the first piece of good fortune Gaddis had experienced in weeks.

  ‘Peter? It’s Sam. I need to see our friend. Now.’

  ‘I’ll call you back.’

  The line went dead. Gaddis was left standing in a phone booth which stank of piss and unwashed men. He opened the door to allow fresh air to funnel inside from the road and as he waited, leaning his body against the worn, age-frosted glass, he realized that he was no longer pursuing Crane for the money. This wasn’t about alimony any more, or tax bills or school fees. It was purely a question of survival; without the book in the public domain, he was a dead man.

  The phone rang. Gaddis grabbed at the receiver before the first ring had even finished.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s not going to be possible today. Afraid the old man’s not feeling too good. Head cold.’

  Ordinarily, Gaddis would have been polite enough to offer his sympathy, but not this time. Instead he forced the point, raising his voice to impress upon Peter the importance of setting up the meeting.

  ‘I don’t really give a shit if he’s feeling unwell. When he hears what I have to tell him, believe me, he’ll be relieved he’s only got a cold.’

  ‘It’s more than that, I’m afraid.’ Peter was calmly changing his story. ‘Running a temperature, as well. Confined to his bed at the home.’

  ‘And where is the home?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Can you tell me this, then? Can you tell me why Calvin Somers has been murdered?’

  ‘Calvin who?’

  ‘Never mind.’ There was no point entering into an argument with Neame’s gatekeeper, no matter how much satisfaction it might have given Gaddis to vent his anger. Instead, he asked if he had a pen.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then write this down. Tell Tom that Calvin Somers has been killed.’ He spelled out the name. ‘Charlotte Berg was also murdered. The way things are going, Tom could be next.’

  ‘Jesus.’ It was the first time that Gaddis had sensed Peter losing his cool. ‘You’re not leading these people to us, are you, Sam?’

  Gaddis ignored the question. ‘There’s more,’ he said. ‘Ludmilla Tretiak’ - again, he had to spell out the name - ‘has been personally instructed by Sergei Platov never to discuss ATTILA. Tretiak is almost certainly under FSB surveil-lance. There’s a link with Crane’s time in Dresden, but I’m not sure what it is. Ask Tom if he can find anything in the memoirs about Crane’s activities in East Germany in the late 1980s. Charlotte’s computer hard drives were deliberately wiped. Somebody knew that she was on to Crane. Tell him all of this.’

  ‘It sounds like something you should be telling him in person,’ Peter replied, and for a moment Gaddis thought that he had breached his defences sufficiently for a meeting to be arranged. But he was to be disappointed. ‘I just don’t think Tom’s going to be up to this for the next couple of days. Any chance you could be down here at the weekend?’

  ‘I’m going to Berlin at the weekend,’ Gaddis replied. He had made the decision on the train and would rack up the cost on a credit card. Benedict Meisner was now his sole remaining chance of a breakthrough. ‘Monday?’

  ‘Monday,’ Peter confirmed. ‘You get to the cathedral by eleven, I promise we’ll be there.’
<
br />   Chapter 25

  Now Gaddis had to gamble.

  Was there a chance that Russian intelligence might have linked him to Calvin? Was he next in the line of fire? If Moscow had been listening to Somers’s telephone calls, bugging his office at the Mount Vernon or analysing his email traffic, then the answer was almost certainly ‘yes’. If his own Internet activity had been under any kind of scrutiny, either by the FSB or GCHQ, the myriad searches he had performed for information about Edward Crane would almost certainly have been flagged up and reacted upon.

  There was less reason to believe that British or Russian intelligence could have tied him to Charlotte’s investigation. True, they had discussed the Cambridge book at supper in Hampstead, but they had not spoken about it on the telephone nor exchanged any emails after that night. It was the same with Ludmilla Tretiak: Gaddis had been careful to leave no email or telephone footprint prior to his visit. Unless the FSB had deliberately lured him to Moscow in order to track his movements, his meeting with Tretiak should have passed unnoticed.

  Other factors seemed to be working in his favour. Somers had been killed more than two weeks earlier. Charlotte had been dead for over a month. If the Russians were going to come for him, they would surely have come already. As long as he remained vigilant, as long as he avoided making any further references to Crane or ATTILA on his computers or phones, he would surely be safe. But was it dumb to go home? Christ, was Min in danger in Barcelona? That thought, more than the threat to his own safety, left Gaddis with a feeling of complete powerlessness. Yet what could he do? If they wanted to get to Min or Natasha, they could do so at a moment’s notice. If they wanted to silence him, they could strike at any time. It would make no difference if he moved into a hotel, slept at Holly’s apartment, or emigrated to Karachi. Sooner or later, the FSB would track him down. Besides, he didn’t want to be driven out of his home by a bunch of gangsters; that was cowardice, pure and simple. He would rather stay and confront them; to give in was another kind of suicide. He would never be able to go back to his old life while the men who had killed Charlotte and Somers were still at large. What would Min make of him if he did that? What would she think of a father who had run?