The Trinity Six (2011)

by Charles Cumming

  Meanwhile, Katie had ridden her bike to the corner of Ebert and Hannah-Arendt Strasses, at the south-western edge of the Memorial, working on the assumption that POLAR-BEAR would eventually come out and make his way south towards Checkpoint Charlie.

  ‘I reckon he’s just doing the tourist thing,’ she said, a view with which Tanya and Ralph concurred when POLARBEAR’s head was observed poking out from a granite block twenty feet from the street. Moments later, Gaddis had emerged on to Hannah-Arendt, lit a cigarette, and walked east on to Friedrichstrasse, where he stood beside a postbox, looking around for a cab.

  ‘He’s obviously waiting for a taxi,’ Ralph duly announced, and Tanya ordered the Audi to within two hundred metres of his position while Ralph looked around for a cab of his own.

  ‘This is it,’ she said. ‘Don’t lose him.’

  They didn’t. The Audi got there in three minutes and tailed POLARBEAR all the way to Prenzlauerberg, a fashionable quarter of former East Berlin where the city’s bohemian elite bought their vinyl records and drank their lattes. Ralph found a taxi two minutes after Gaddis but was called off after being reassured by Des that the ‘situation is very much under what I like to call control’. At 15.46 Gaddis was observed paying the driver of the cab and stepping out on to Schonhauser Allee.

  ‘He’s a block from Meisner’s office,’ Tanya declared, looking down at a map of Berlin. She had visited the location at nine o’clock the previous evening. ‘Let’s see if we can get his phone to work.’

  POLARBEAR’s mobile was her only potential problem. Two days earlier, when Gaddis had left it unattended in his office at UCL, an SIS technician had succeeded in installing a piece of software which turned the phone into a remotely activated microphone. The bug had worked once, successfully, when Ralph had tested it from a car parked outside Gaddis’s house, but things were always more complicated in an overseas location. Meisner’s surgery was also on the third floor; getting a clear signal down to the Audi would take a mixture of luck and finesse.

  Out on the street, Gaddis had found the entrance. A plaque outside announced:

  BENEDICT MEISNER AKUPUNKTUR HOMOOPATHIE WIRBELSAULEN UND GELENKTHERAPIE

  It was a mystery. How did a trained medical doctor end up practising acupuncture and homeopathy in Berlin? Had Meisner been struck off? Gaddis looked at his watch and realized that he had ten minutes to kill before his appointment. It was enough time in which to call Josephine Warner.

  ‘He’s taking out his phone,’ Des announced.

  Josephine answered the call with an enthusiasm appropriate to the circumstances.

  ‘Sam! Are you here?’

  ‘Ja,’ Gaddis replied in cod-German, immediately regretting the joke. ‘How’s your sister?’

  She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Annoying the shit out of me. I’ve realized why I never come to visit.’

  Gaddis smiled. ‘Then I can persuade you to abandon her for dinner tomorrow night?’

  ‘You definitely can.’ Josephine was already flirting with him and - who knows? - perhaps even toying with the prospect of a post-dinner nightcap on the third floor of the Tiergarten Novotel.

  ‘I know a place,’ Gaddis told her, because he had researched decent Berlin restaurants on the Internet and booked a table for two - just in case - at Cafe Jacques in Neukolln.

  Before long, they had fixed a time and a place and Gaddis had hung up, ringing the bell of Meisner’s surgery. Des duly activated the bug in POLARBEAR’s mobile and, within moments, Tanya Acocella was listening to Gaddis as he introduced himself to the receptionist.

  ‘Guten Tag,’ he said. ‘I apologize. I don’t speak German.’

  ‘This is all right, sir.’

  ‘I have an appointment with Doctor Meisner at four o’clock.’

  To Tanya’s relief, the take quality was first class; she was listening through a set of headphones and it was as if the conversation was taking place in the next room. She heard the receptionist asking Gaddis to fill out a form - ‘just some of your personal and medical information please’ - then the sigh of Gaddis slumping into an armchair, a brief crash on the bug as he reached for a pen in the inside pocket of his jacket, and a rustle of paper as he filled out the form.

  Three minutes later, a telephone rang in the waiting room. The receptionist picked it up and Gaddis was invited ‘please to go through now’ to Meisner’s surgery. He offered to return the medical form, but was told to keep it with him and to ‘please to show it to the doctor when you arrive’. Tanya tried to picture Gaddis ducking through the connecting door and shaking Meisner’s hand. She was wondering what the hell he was planning to say to him.

  ‘So! We are both doctors!’

  Meisner had a thick German accent and sounded chirpy and easygoing.

  ‘That’s right.’ Gaddis’s voice was flatter, more nervous. ‘Different areas of expertise, though. I don’t tend to save lives on a daily basis.’

  She liked that, the flattery. Gaddis was softening him up.

  ‘Oh, I don’t save lives any more, Doctor. I simply relieve the pain. And what is your area of expertise?’

  ‘I’m an academic, at University College, London.’

  ‘Ah! UCL! Sit down, please, sit down.’

  Another cushioned slump as Gaddis settled into a chair. Tanya heard him explain that he was a lecturer in Russian History in the Department of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies. Meisner kept saying ‘Ja, ja‘ and appeared to be enormously interested in everything Gaddis was saying.

  ‘Really? Is that right? How fascinating. I myself lived in London some time ago.’

  ‘You did? Whereabouts?’

  ‘In the Hampstead area. I worked at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington for a number of years. Do you know it?’

  ‘I know it.’

  This, of course, was POLARBEAR’s opportunity and Tanya wondered if he would take it. Typically, in a conversation of this type, it was better to show one’s hand earlier, rather than to build up an implicit trust which was then shattered by the truth.

  ‘In fact, that’s sort of the reason why I’ve come today.’

  He was going for it. Tanya heard Meisner say: ‘I am sorry, I don’t quite understand’ and felt her stomach kick. She pressed the headphones closer to her ears.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m here under false pretences, Doctor.’

  ‘False pretences—’

  Meisner sounded confused, defensive.

  Gaddis pressed on. ‘I don’t have an underlying medical condition. I’m not looking for treatment of any kind. I wanted to talk to you about your time at St Mary’s. I knew that you wouldn’t see me if I told you who I was or why I was coming here today.’

  Tanya tried to imagine Meisner’s reaction. He wore tortoise-shell glasses over lively, expressive eyes, and his broad, tanned face was genial and unassuming. There was a long silence. Somebody sniffed. She could hear a tapping sound and assumed that Meisner was rapping his fingers on the surface of his desk.

  ‘You were in communication with a friend of mine,’ Gaddis began.

  ‘Charlotte Berg,’ Meisner replied immediately. All of his bedside bonhomie had evaporated. ‘I must ask you to leave immediately.’ Tanya heard the noise of a chair scraping back on a hard floor. Meisner was getting to his feet.

  Gaddis said: ‘Please, just hear me out. I have come here to warn you. My visit is for your own safety.’

  ‘Doctor Gaddis, please do not let me lose my temper. Do you wish me to call the police? I can either ask you to leave in a civilized fashion or I will have no hesitation—’

  ‘Charlotte Berg is dead.’ POLARBEAR had held his nerve. ‘She was most probably killed by Russian intelligence.’

  The ensuing silence was so pronounced that Tanya wondered if the microphone had failed. She was about to call Des when Meisner responded:

  ‘And why is this of any concern to me?’

  ‘You remember Calvin Somers?’

  ‘As I told Miss Berg, I
have no recollection of an individual of that name and, if you insist on making allegations of this kind, I will have no hesitation to pursue libel actions against you in a court of law.’

  ‘Somers is also dead.’ Gaddis’s reply contained just the right level of threat. ‘He was murdered, again most probably by Russian intelligence.’

  She heard Meisner sniff, then a hole of silence. Gaddis spoke into the void.

  ‘I don’t need to tell you that this only leaves you and the porter still alive.’

  ‘The porter?’

  ‘Waldemar. Lucy Forman died in a car accident in 2001.’ This piece of information pushed Meisner back into his chair. Tanya wondered if either man knew that Waldemar had died in Krakow in 1999. ‘I don’t know if the crash was an accident or if it was engineered. All I’m saying is that you need to watch your back.’

  ‘That is not what you are saying, Doctor.’

  Gaddis conceded the point. ‘You’re right. I need your assistance as well. There are things you may know which could help to keep both of us alive.’

  Another silence. Tanya scratched an itch at the end of her nose.

  ‘Do you still retain any links to Douglas Henderson?’ Gaddis asked. His tone of voice had become more conciliatory. ‘Are you aware that his real name is Sir John Brennan and that he is now the Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service?’

  Careful, Sam, thought Tanya. Don’t be giving away too many of our secrets.

  ‘I did not know this,’ Meisner replied. His throat was dry and it sounded as though he took a sip of water.

  ‘The man whose death you orchestrated was called Edward Crane. He was a double agent for MI6. The Russians wanted him dead, so Brennan made them think that he had died of cancer.’

  ‘I had always wanted to know the answer to this question,’ Meisner replied quietly.

  Gaddis pushed for more. ‘Do you remember anything at all about Crane? Did MI6 give you any indication what would happen to him? Were you ever asked to perform similar duties for British Intelligence at any point in the future?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘What about ATTILA? Did anybody ever mention that name to you? Has anybody, apart from Charlotte Berg, ever spoken to you about what happened in 1992?’

  ‘You are the first person I have ever spoken to about it.’

  Without seeing his eyes, Tanya could not tell if Meisner was lying, but the answer sounded truthful enough.

  ‘Then why do you think Somers was killed? Why do you think the Russians murdered Charlotte?’

  Meisner emitted a strange, choked laugh. ‘Doctor Gaddis, it sounds to me as though these are questions to which you yourself should know the answer. I have nothing more. I have done nothing wrong. I was paid by MI6 to keep my mouth closed. I have kept my mouth closed. I signed your Official Secrets Act, just as once upon a time I signed a Hippocratic Oath. These things mean something to me. My reputation is important. If Benedict Meisner puts his name to something, if he makes a promise of any kind, then he keeps it. This is not a very modern concept, I grant you, but it is nevertheless essential to my own philosophy.’

  There was another silence. The headphones had formed what felt like a pressure seal around Tanya’s ears and she briefly pulled them apart, feeling the sweat on her temples.

  ‘What about Thomas Neame?’ Gaddis asked. ‘Does that name mean anything to you?’

  It was almost as if Tanya could see Meisner shaking his head. ‘I have never heard this name. Who is he please?’

  She swore lightly under her breath and thought back to the Vauxhall Cross courtyard. Sooner or later, she had told Brennan, Gaddis is going to find out that Neame is the sixth man. Exactly, the Chief had said. And when he does, that’s precisely the point at which we step in. She had been furious at his deception, humiliated that her boss should have tasked her with tracking Gaddis’s movements without first supplying what was surely the most vital piece of information associated with the operation. Need to know, I’m afraid, he had told her, trying to soften the blow with one of his toadying smiles. Only a handful of people in the world know what happened to Edward Crane. Now you’re one of them.

  Gaddis was doing something in his seat. Tanya could hear what sounded like a scratching of cloth and wondered if he was taking off his jacket. But then the take quality became even clearer and she realized that POLARBEAR had removed the mobile phone.

  ‘I have a photograph of him,’ he was saying. Tanya put two and two together as Gaddis began to click through the images in the phone’s gallery. ‘Have you seen this man before?’

  She waited. There was nothing she could do to prevent what was about to happen. She heard Meisner lift out of his chair and then the noise of the phone being passed across the desk. The sound Meisner made when he saw the photograph of Neame in the pub was just what she had expected: a breath of disbelief.

  ‘But this is the man,’ he told Gaddis. ‘This is the man who was admitted to the hospital. The person in this photograph is not your Thomas Neame. The person in the photograph is Edward Crane.’

  Chapter 28

  It was only a small consolation to Gaddis that he had briefly suspected Neame and Crane of being the same man. Otherwise, he felt wretched and embarrassed, duped by a master liar. There was no memoir, he reflected. There was no memoir because Thomas Neame was the story. All that time, he had been talking to the sixth man but had been too dumb and too greedy to see it. The sensation was not dissimilar to the hollow feeling of being betrayed by a friend, or manipulated by a jealous colleague; he was humiliated, but he was also intensely angry. All his life, Gaddis had wanted to think the best of people, to take them at face value and to trust that human decency would win through. Of course, it was naive to think this way, to believe that the world had his best interests at heart. He should have seen what Crane was up to. Here was a man, like Philby, who had lived his entire adult life as an elaborate masquerade. Crane did not so much possess a personality as a series of masks; as each mask was removed, it was replaced by another. Neame was simply the latest in a long line of parallel lives, a role played as much for Crane’s personal amusement as for the practical purpose of disguising his real identity. In his youth, Crane had pretended to the British government that he was a loyal and dedicated servant of the Crown, yet all the while he had been passing secrets to the NKVD. He had then coolly switched allegiances, having long since convinced Moscow that his heart belonged to Mother Russia. The two positions were mirrors of each other, reflections of the same ideology. Edward Crane had no country. Edward Crane had only himself.

  Looked at from this perspective, it made absolute sense to Gaddis that Crane should have chosen to tell the ATTILA story through a shell personality; it would have been contrary to his nature to expose his true self. A spy needed the protection of a cover story, a pseudonym. Besides, Crane would have enjoyed the intellectual challenge of duping Gaddis; doubtless he had derived enormous satisfaction from gulling a so-called leading academic. At what point had he been planning to come clean? Would he have gone to his grave as Thomas Neame, holding on to this last, elusive secret? Almost certainly. Why break the habit of a lifetime?

  ‘POLARBEAR looks well fucked off,’ said Des, following Gaddis on foot from Meisner’s surgery. Meisner had agreed to meet him at a cafe near his apartment in Kreuzberg at eight o’clock. ‘Whoever the fuck this Edward Crane is has put our boy in a very bad mood indeed.’

  Two hundred metres away, Nicolai Doronin was also watching Meisner’s surgery, though he paid scant attention to Gaddis as he came out on to the street at half-past four, incorrectly assuming that the six-foot man with a corduroy jacket and leather satchel was a resident of one of the luxury apartments on the fourth or fifth floors. Nor did Doronin notice Des getting out of a blue-black Audi A4 on the corner of Schonhauser Allee in order to tail Gaddis to the U-Bahn at Eberswalder Strasse. Doronin’s interest lay solely in Benedict Meisner. He had been watching the doctor for forty-eight hours. He had e
stablished that he lived alone, had learned his daily routine, calculated his approximate physical strength, pondered his likely resistance to violent assault. On balance, Doronin felt that it would be wisest to pursue a similar strategy to that which had succeeded with Charlotte Berg. Just as Alexander Grek had broken into her office, he would access Meisner’s apartment, add 10mg of sodium fluoracetate to the bottle of water which Meisner kept by his bed, and return to London on the next scheduled flight from Tegel.

  Doronin had not expected to carry out the plan until the following day, but having tailed Meisner back to his apartment on Reichenberger Strasse he had waited outside for an hour, only to see the doctor emerge at ten to eight wearing a fresh set of clothes and carrying a copy of Der Spiegel. It was obvious that he was going out for dinner. Sure enough, Doronin followed Meisner the length of Liegnitzer Strasse to his favourite cafe, which was a few hundred metres away on the corner of Paul-Lincke-Ufer. Meisner took an outdoor table, scanned the menu and ordered a glass of beer. This presented Doronin with a window of opportunity. He was keen to return to London so that he could spend at least some of the weekend with his young son. If he could pull off the Meisner operation tonight, he could be back at his flat in Kensington by lunchtime the next day.

  So Doronin missed seeing the six-foot man with the corduroy jacket and the leather satchel getting out of a cab on Liegnitzer Strasse. Less than three minutes after he had turned and walked back in the direction of Meisner’s apartment, Sam Gaddis had pulled up, spotted Meisner and sat down at his table.

  British Intelligence, on the other hand, were ahead of the game. Knowing that Meisner and Gaddis had arranged to meet at the cafe, Katie and Ralph had positioned themselves on the terrace, ordered two enormous bowls of onion soup, occasionally held hands for cover, and waited for POLARBEAR to show up. Tanya was sitting outside Meisner’s apartment, at the opposite end of the street, texting them from the front seat of the Audi. To her fury, POLARBEAR had left his mobile at the Novotel, which meant that audio coverage of his conversation with Meisner would now be impossible.