The cafe was popular with local families. Even at eight o’clock in the evening, young mothers were breast-feeding their children in the cool autumnal air, fresh-faced fathers bouncing toddlers on their knees. But service was slow. Gaddis had been sitting with Meisner for five minutes before the ageing hippie waitress deigned to show up and take his order for a cup of coffee.
‘You want a coffee?’ asked an incredulous Meisner. ‘At this time of night?’
Gaddis explained that it had been a long day - ‘I was up at five’ - and turned his attention to the menu. The cafe offered the sort of food he loathed: right-on stews, bean soups, tofu salads sprinkled with snow peas and pine nuts. He would have killed for a rib-eye steak.
‘What the hell’s a bio-bratwurst?’ he asked, but the doctor merely stared at him blankly through his tortoiseshell glasses. He had the distracted look of a man coming to terms with the indiscretions of his past. Gaddis scanned the food on the neighbouring tables. Surely there was something worth eating? Beside him, two undernourished Scandinavians were picking gingerly at a rocket salad. A string of lights was suspended over their table, hung between two chestnut trees. In the other direction, a young couple - British, by the look of their clothes - were holding hands and finishing off two large bowls of onion soup.
Gaddis froze.
He had seen the woman before: that afternoon, on the southern edge of the Holocaust Memorial, leaning on a bicycle and staring past him in the direction of the Reichstag. He had noticed her because she had been wearing a yellow overcoat identical to one that Holly had worn on a date to the cinema. He looked at the woman’s chair. Sure enough, the same coat was draped around the back of her seat.
Was he under surveillance? Gaddis’s coffee arrived and he was grateful for the distraction because it meant that he could fix his attention on the waitress. There was a small macaroon resting on the saucer and he swallowed it in an attempt to keep his behaviour natural.
‘Damn,’ Meisner said.
‘What?’
‘I forget my cigarettes.’ The doctor was checking his pockets, patting the inside of his jacket. ‘Would you mind waiting here while I go back to my apartment? It is just around the corner, just a few minutes away.’
Was this part of the surveillance operation, part of some pre-arranged plan? Was Meisner working in tandem with the British? Gaddis was about to offer him one of his own cigarettes when he realized that Meisner’s suggestion had presented him with the opportunity to leave the cafe.
‘Can I be honest?’ he said.
Meisner frowned. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Would you mind if we ate dinner somewhere else?’
‘Are you cold or something? They have blankets inside.’
‘No. It’s not the cold. I’d just rather we finished our drinks, fetched your cigarettes and went somewhere else to eat.’
Meisner suddenly saw what Gaddis was driving at. His face seemed to draw back on to its bones. When he lowered his voice, it was tight with nerves.
‘You think there is a possibility that—’
Gaddis interrupted him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think there is that distinct possibility.’
They stood up immediately. Gaddis drained his coffee in a single gulp, secured a ten-euro note under a sugar bowl and led Meisner off the terrace. They were fifty metres up Liegnitzer when he turned and saw the man who had been sitting with the woman in the yellow overcoat crossing the street behind them. He was speaking into a mobile phone.
‘I think POLARBEAR just made us,’ Ralph was telling Tanya. He was embarrassed, spitting with rage. ‘Fuck it. He’s coming towards you. Looks like they’re heading to Meisner’s apartment.’
‘We will go into my home and think what to do,’ Meisner was muttering. Gaddis was concerned by how quickly his companion’s mood had deteriorated into outright panic. ‘Why did you bring these people to me? Everything was fine in Berlin until Doctor Sam Gaddis shows up.’
Gaddis turned again but could not see anybody following them. A part of him wanted to walk back to the cafe and to confront the couple at their table. Who were they? Who had sent them? He was certain that nobody had followed him from Shonefeld, but it would have been all too easy to trace his movements via his credit cards, or even by locking on to the signal emitted by his mobile phone. Yet he had accidentally left that at the Novotel. How had they found him?
At the north end of Liegnitzer, Meisner turned left into Reichenberger Strasse, a broad residential street, now in semi-darkness. At one point, Tanya was no more than fifteen feet away from them, concealed in the gloom of her parked Audi. She saw Meisner reach for his keys as Gaddis followed him into the building. They both looked tense. There had not been time to install audio/visual in Meisner’s apartment, so she knew that whatever took place between them, whatever they discussed, would remain secret.
The building was a restored nineteenth-century apartment block with two flats on each level. Halfway up the stairs they passed a teenage Goth wearing torn denim jeans and a black leather jacket. She ignored Meisner and kept her head bowed as she walked past Gaddis, clomping down to the lobby. On the second floor, Meisner placed his key in the lock, opened the door of his apartment, and stepped inside.
Something caused him to pause on the threshold and Gaddis bunched up behind him as they walked in. He looked up. A gun had appeared from behind the door, levelled at the left side of Meisner’s head. In the same instant, a shot was fired, a shot almost without noise, which sent a spume of brain tissue thumping into a gilt mirror on the right-hand side of the passage. Instinctively, Gaddis put all of his weight against the door and forced it open. Meisner had slumped to the ground beneath him. He felt someone blocking the door on the other side and pushed harder. A man swore in Russian and Gaddis saw the gun fall out into the corridor.
He should have run. That would have been the smart thing to do. He should have closed the door and sprinted downstairs. But Meisner’s body was blocking the way. Instead, terrified that the Russian would pick up the gun, Gaddis went forward into the apartment and scrambled across a polished wooden floor. He could sense Meisner’s assailant behind him, already clambering to his feet, but he had time to reach the gun and to turn, levelling the barrel at the man’s body. The Russian came towards him and Gaddis fired.
The bullet hit Nicolai Doronin on the right side of the chest, just below the shoulder blade. There was a gasp of pain as he slumped to the ground, staring wildly at Gaddis. His finger still on the trigger, Gaddis fired again, this time out of panic. The second shot seemed to go through the man’s neck and there was a sharp crack, as if a wall or a door jamb had been hit. Gaddis had not fired a pistol since he was seventeen years old, shooting at targets in a field in Scotland, and he was bewildered by the power, by the simplicity of what he had done. He glanced down at the barrel and saw that a silencer had been fitted. That was why there had been no noise. All he could hear was the sound of his own breathing, as fast as if he had sprinted up the stairs. He looked back towards the door. There was blood on the walls, blood in the passage. Meisner wasn’t moving. The Russian was moaning and turning away from him, bunched up in a foetal crouch near the wall.
He should have stayed. He realized that later. But in that moment, in the aftermath of what he had seen and done, Gaddis wanted to be out of the building, as far from the apartment as possible. He moved towards Meisner and saw, to his horror, that the entire left side of his head had been completely removed. He was looking into a man’s brain and it was no more than a few shards of tissue and bloodied hair and he was almost sick on the floor. He did not look at the Russian. He knew that he did not have the courage to shoot him again nor to check if he was still alive. Had he killed a man tonight? He should have rung the police. He should have alerted a neighbour. But instead Gaddis sprinted, almost flew, in three-step leaps down the stairs of the apartment building and out on to the road.
Tanya jerked forward in the Audi when she saw him coming out. She instantly knew
that something was wrong. It was as if a wind had blasted Gaddis into the street. She saw him begin to jog along Reichenberger, apparently without direction or purpose. She switched on the engine, reversed into the street and followed him in a first-gear crawl.
Gaddis became aware of the Audi when he was about three hundred metres from Meisner’s apartment. It could only be the Russians, he thought, the accomplices of the man he had just shot. They were following him down the street and they meant to finish the job. His mind was scrambled. He was sick with fear, sick with guilt at what he had done. He wished that he had kept the gun that had felled the Russian, but realized that he had dropped it on to Meisner’s body as he stared at his wounds. He looked back. The Audi was fifty metres away. Why was it coming so slowly? Why were they not intent on killing him? He stopped and turned, suddenly overcome by a desire to confront them. There were two members of the public walking on the pavement on the opposite side of the street. Would they dare to kill him in the presence of so many witnesses?
‘Sam!’
It was a woman’s voice, a scream in the night. It made no sense that somebody should know his name. Gaddis veered into the road.
The car came to an immediate halt. Gaddis was standing in front of it, the headlights blinding him. As he adjusted his gaze, squinting and shielding his eyes from the glare, he saw, to his utter consternation, that Josephine Warner was at the wheel.
‘Get in,’ Tanya said.
Chapter 29
‘What happened, Sam? Tell me.’
Gaddis was staring at her, pressed back into the front seat as Tanya accelerated along Reichenberger.
‘Why are you here? What’s going on?’
‘I am not who you think I am,’ she said. ‘Tell me what happened.’ She turned to look at him. ‘You have blood on your jacket. Where’s Meisner?’
‘Meisner is dead.’ He knew that she was MI6. It was obvious to him now: the deception at Kew; the dinner; the coincidence of her trip to Berlin. He wished that he had kept running. ‘Meisner was shot. I just killed a man. What the fuck is happening? Why are you here?’
‘My name is Tanya Acocella. I’m an officer with the Secret Intelligence Service. We’ve been following you because of your investigation into Edward Crane. I’m sorry, it was necessary for me to pretend to be somebody else. Please try to stay focused. What do you mean, you just killed a man?’
It was almost a relief to hear her confession. At least he knew, finally, what he was up against. Then Gaddis told her what had happened and, as he did so, heard the truth of his own life and career, annihilated by what he had done. ‘Somebody was in the apartment,’ he said. ‘A Russian. Maybe the same man who killed Charlotte. Maybe the same man who killed Calvin. You know who these people are. You know what I’m talking about?’
‘I know what you’re talking about.’ Tanya’s eyes were fixed on the road.
‘We went back to get cigarettes.’ Gaddis wanted to be inside the car and outside the car. He wanted to be protected by this woman and yet he wanted to be as far from her as possible. ‘A man was inside the front door. He must have been waiting for Meisner. We must have surprised him. I don’t know what he was doing there. He shot him as soon as he walked in.’
‘Are you carrying a gun?’
Tanya was making a fast left-hand turn through a green light on a deserted roundabout. She could not understand how POLARBEAR had got out alive.
‘Of course I’m not carrying a fucking gun. I forced the door and it fell out of his hand. He can’t have been expecting two people. It fell in front of me. I picked it up because there was nothing else I could do. I just turned and shot. I think I may have killed him.’
‘Jesus, Sam.’
He didn’t like the fact that she used his name so easily. He had been duped by Crane and now he had been duped by Josephine Warner, a woman that - Christ! - he had hoped to sweet-talk into bed twenty-four hours later.
‘Look,’ she said, turning to face him, ‘do you understand what has happened to you?’
Gaddis moved in his seat, aware that he was soaked in sweat. He looked at his jacket and saw spots of blood sprayed across the sleeve. He felt as though he was locked down, trapped, and experienced a vivid need to wrench the wheel from Tanya’s hands and to send the car piling into a newsstand at the side of the road.
‘I should go to the police,’ he said, trying to remain calm. ‘I need you to stop the car.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t do that.’ Wipers swept dirt from the windscreen. ‘If you go to the police, Crane will be exposed. We can’t allow that to happen. The German authorities would very quickly start to piece things together. Whoever you killed tonight was almost certainly working for the Platov government. I need to get you out of Berlin and back to London.’
Gaddis looked again at his sleeve, streetlights pulsing on the blood.
‘How am I supposed to get out of Berlin?’ he said. ‘There are fingerprints on the gun. I passed a girl on the stairs as we came in. I was seen at the cafe with Meisner. The police will have a description of me in less than twenty-four hours. The only thing I can do is tell them the truth of what happened. Why I was meeting Meisner, why I was in Berlin, why the Russians wanted him dead.’
‘You cannot do that.’
He was bewildered and yet he knew why she was obstructing him. It was an MI6 cover-up. Nobody could know about Crane, about ATTILA, about Dresden.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘Tell me why? What is so fucking important about a twenty-year-old secret that people have to die in order to stop it coming out? I saw a man’s brains tonight. I saw Meisner’s head completely blown away.’
‘We are simply trying to protect the relationship between London and Moscow,’ Tanya replied feebly. She knew that she was retreating into platitudes and could hear the disgust in Gaddis’s voice.
‘What? What does that mean, Josephi—’ He began to use her cover name and felt a fool. ‘What relationship between London and Moscow? There isn’t a relationship between London and Moscow. You loathe each other.’
Tanya tried again, although she knew that what Gaddis had said was close to the truth. ‘The German press can’t get hold of this story, nor can they know about your involvement with Crane.’
Gaddis shook his head.
‘What happened in Dresden?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Dresden. Something happened in Dresden. On ATTILA’s watch, in the twilight of his career. Something involving Platov and Robert Wilkinson. Tell me what it was.’
‘Sam, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ This was the truth. She thought of Brennan and wondered if Gaddis had stumbled on the very secret which the Chief himself was surely trying to conceal from her. ‘We need to concentrate on you at the moment. We need to get you out of Berlin. There’ll be all the time in the world to hear your concerns when we are back in London.’
‘My concerns,’ he repeated witheringly. Tanya’s mobile rang and he gazed out of the window as she picked up.
‘Yes?’ Gaddis could hear a male voice speaking on the line and assumed that it was the man who had been watching him at the cafe. ‘No, I’ve got him,’ she said. ‘Something happened. Yes. Everything’s fine. I can’t speak now. Get everyone back to the flat. I’ll contact you there.’
‘Friend of yours?’ he asked when she had hung up.
‘Friend of mine,’ she replied.
‘Tell him I liked his girlfriend’s coat.’
Tanya ran an amber light. ‘Look. What can you remember? Was there any CCTV in the apartment building? Did you see a camera?’
‘I wasn’t looking. We were just going upstairs for cigarettes. We left the cafe to get away from your friends.’
‘But you say you passed a girl on the stairs?’
‘A Goth. Yes.’
Tanya was piecing things together, trying to find a way of saving him. He was oddly grateful for the effort. ‘And the receptionist saw your face at the surgery today.’
; ‘Oh great,’ he exclaimed. ‘You were there as well?’
‘We were there.’
She did not have the heart to tell him about the bug in his phone.
The Audi was skirting the edge of a park. In a floodlit cage, men were playing five-a-side football. Gaddis watched them and thought of Sunday nights in London. Another world.
‘What about Berlin?’ Tanya asked. She pulled the car into a quiet residential street and switched off the engine. ‘Who knew you were coming to meet Meisner?’
‘Just you,’ he replied. ‘Just Josephine Warner.’
She ran a hand through her hair, pushing away the slight. ‘What about Holly?’
‘What about her?’ Gaddis could glimpse another nail being landed in the coffin of his humiliation. ‘Is she one of yours too?’
‘Holly has nothing to do with us.’
‘Then why did she give me the files on the KGB?’
‘What files?’
‘Never mind.’
The street was deserted. He could smell Tanya’s perfume, the same scent that had drifted towards him at Kew. He was still drawn to her and he hated that about himself.
‘Don’t worry about the gun,’ she said suddenly, and again he had the feeling of being removed from himself, of looking at Sam Gaddis in the third person. ‘There’ll be fingerprints, but to the best of my knowledge, you don’t have anything on record. Is that the case?’
Of course. They knew all about him. They had combed through his past. MI6 would know about the divorce, about Min, about his work at UCL. Everything he had said and done for weeks had been analysed by Tanya Acocella.
‘That is the case,’ he said quietly.
There was nothing else to do but to go back to the Novotel. Tanya explained that one of the members of the surveil-lance team had taken a room on the third floor. By now, Gaddis was so numb to surprise that he merely nodded, his mind fixed on an image of Meisner’s brain which he could not erase.
The Trinity Six (2011) Page 19