The Trinity Six (2011)

by Charles Cumming

  ‘We need to get rid of your jacket,’ she said, and Gaddis gave it to her without objection, then watched as she stepped out of the car and dropped it in a nearby bin. It was an old jacket, a cherished gift from his late father, but he felt no dismay; she might as well have been throwing away a newspaper. Tanya then made a call to Des and instructed him to buy two tickets to London on the first available flight out of Berlin. Twenty minutes later, he had rung back, telling her they were booked on a British Midland out of Berlin Tegel at 8 a.m.

  ‘My car’s at Luton,’ Gaddis said.

  ‘Somebody will pick it up for you.’

  They drove back towards Tiergarten station, along the banks of the Landwehrkanal, the oblivious city slipping by. Tanya felt desperately sorry for him, wondering what must be going through his mind and regretting that it had been necessary to involve this decent man in a world that had now all but destroyed him.

  ‘I want you to promise me something,’ she said when she had parked at the hotel. They had been driving in silence for ten minutes.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You can’t go to the police. Do you understand that, Sam?’ Gaddis did not reply.

  ‘If you turn yourself in, we can’t help you. The Russians will know who you are. You will face months, even years of legal problems in Berlin, and eventually Platov’s people will find you. Allow us to strike a deal with the Germans.’

  He nodded, but she could not be sure if he had agreed.

  ‘We can protect you in England,’ she said. She needed to be absolutely certain of his co-operation. ‘We can make arrangements with the German authorities. Your involvement in what happened this evening need never come to light.’

  ‘You can’t possibly make a guarantee of that kind.’

  Tanya reached for his hand and squeezed it. The gesture surprised both of them.

  ‘Let me at least try to convince you that I can. Stay in your room tonight. Leave with me in the morning. When we’re back in London, I promise you that everything will become easier.’

  ‘Easier,’ he said, wiped out by shock. He was hungry and craved a cigarette, but realized that he had left his packet in the inside pocket of a jacket which was now in a bin on the other side of Berlin.

  They went into the hotel. Tanya walked beside him and, as they came into the lobby, put her arm around his back, whispering to him.

  ‘We are lovers,’ she said. ‘You are happy.’

  It was enough of a trick to take them past any snooping eyes at reception. Gaddis looked at her as they reached the lifts.

  ‘You think of everything,’ he said, but she knew from his eyes that he despised her.

  In the room, he took four miniature bottles of whisky from the mini-bar, filled a glass and drank them as a shot. He then went into the bathroom and sat under the shower for almost half an hour. All the while, Tanya waited outside. She called Brennan in London, explained what had happened, then watched German television for reports on the shootings in Kreuzberg. At eleven o’clock, a news channel went live to Reichenburger Strasse and she recognized the door of Meisner’s apartment building, now with police tape slung across the entrance. There were shots of bewildered neighbours - old women in nightgowns, young Turkish men in jeans and T-shirts - gazing up at the windows on the second floor.

  ‘Turn it off,’ Gaddis told her.

  She sat with him, but they barely spoke. She had ordered sandwiches from room service but Gaddis left his food untouched. At around half-past two, sedated by hunger and whisky, he finally fell into a light sleep, waking an hour later to find Tanya staring at him from an armchair across the room. She wasn’t concerned for his welfare, he reflected. She was simply making sure he didn’t make a run for it.

  ‘What was true and what wasn’t?’ he said. His voice was low and cracked.

  ‘I don’t understand the question.’

  ‘Was there a sixth man or wasn’t there?’

  ‘There was a sixth man.’

  Gaddis felt a pulse of satisfaction.

  ‘And the details? Did Crane really work with Cairncross at Bletchley? Did he run a ring of NKVD spies out of Oxford?

  Tanya shook her head. ‘I really don’t know,’ she said.

  He turned on to his side. ‘What about the switch? What about Dick White? Did Crane become a double agent or did he dupe you for another thirty years?’

  ‘That seems very unlikely,’ she said, sounding almost dismissive, but he wanted to educate her. It occurred to him that she was young enough to be one of his students.

  ‘Philby went to White,’ he said. ‘Did you know that? In ‘63. They were on to him, so he made a marginal confession. Told them he’d been a Soviet spy but insisted that his betrayal had been confined to the war years. Everything after that, he said, had been for Queen and Country.’ Tanya was looking at him intently. ‘And they believed him. They let him go. Philby was such an accomplished liar that the finest minds in MI5 and MI6 fell for his line of bullshit. Less than a week later he was on a ship to Moscow. Maybe Crane pulled the same trick.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, though this was no more than a hunch.

  ‘Why do you think people are being killed, Tanya?’ He had found a new belligerence, and took a bite from the stale club sandwich. ‘Why haven’t the British shouted from the rooftops about Crane? Do you ever think about that? Why is Sergei Platov ordering the assassination of anybody linked to ATTILA?’

  ‘Sam, I keep telling you, I don’t know.’ She realized now why she liked and admired him. At twenty-five, steered by ambition, Tanya Acocella had abandoned a promising career in academia for the lure of the secret world. Gaddis re presented both her past and her alternative future: a life of free enquiry, of scholarship. ‘There are elements to this operation which are so secret even I haven’t been made privy to them. Nobody on my team even knows who Crane is. As far as they’re concerned, this is just another job. My task was to find out what you knew. I wasn’t privy to your con versations in Winchester. All I know is that, under the terms of the Secrets Act, Crane was under oath never to discuss his career. That was the quid pro quo for setting him up as Neame. But obviously he’s got to the point where he wants to tell somebody about ATTILA, about what he’s done, because he’s ninety-one and doesn’t like the idea of going to his grave without people realizing what a bloody hero he is. So he told your friend, and now your friend is dead. He told her about Calvin Somers, and now Somers is dead as well. It may not be what you want to hear right now, but it’s only by extreme good fortune that you are still alive.’

  Gaddis laughed. ‘And do I have you to credit for that, Tanya? Should I be writing MI6 a thank you letter?’

  She shook her head in frustration and looked at him as if he was being unnecessarily confrontational.

  ‘Who’s Peter?’ he asked her.

  ‘Special Branch,’ she replied, because she wanted to be as honest as the circumstances would allow.

  Of course, Gaddis thought. Not a private sector spook hired by Crane to protect Neame, but a first line of defence for the most illustrious spy in the history of MI6. ‘And he was happy to co-operate in Crane’s decision to go public? Why didn’t he come running and tell you lot what was going on?’

  ‘Divided loyalties, I suppose. You know as well as anybody that Edward Crane can be a very persuasive man.’ It was a mean-spirited remark, but Gaddis accepted it without objection. ‘Perhaps he offered to cut Peter in on the profits. Perhaps Peter came to believe that ATTILA’s story deserved to be told. Who knows?’

  He lay back on the pillow. His head throbbed and he asked Tanya to pass him the water. He drank from the bottle, setting it on the bedside table. It was strange, but she was beautiful to him again. He remembered their conversation at dinner, the way that she had looked at him, and felt a fool for having believed in her.

  ‘We need to talk about the morning,’ she said. ‘In a few hours we’ll be checking out. The airport is one place they might be looking for yo
u.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘You say the person that you shot was Russian. The police may assume he was working with an accomplice. They’ll be looking for a third man, for the person who left the crime scene. That somebody would probably try to leave Berlin as soon as possible.’

  ‘Then why are we going?’ he asked.

  ‘Because they won’t suspect us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘We’ll be together. We’ll be arm in arm.’

  He sat up and hit the master switch on the panel of lights beside the bed. The room blazed. ‘There’s no way I’m doing that.’

  ‘It’s the best way, believe me. The simplest strategy. Just a couple coming back from a romantic break in Berlin. A lone man would draw more attention. You’ll just have to trust me, Sam. It’s the only way.’

  Chapter 30

  They left the hotel at six. Further news had emerged about the shootings at Reichenberger Strasse. According to German television, Meisner’s assailant was still alive and had been taken into intensive care, where he was in a stable condition. This was scant consolation to Gaddis and did nothing to lift his mood of despair. He may no longer have been responsible for taking a man’s life, but the horror that he had witnessed at Meisner’s apartment was still as vivid and as shocking to him as the mutilation of a child.

  ‘We need to be careful,’ Tanya told him as Des drove them out to the airport. ‘If you see someone you know at any point, either in the terminal or on the plane, and if you can’t avoid them, act normally.’ She seemed oblivious to Gaddis’s state of mind, thinking only of the security of the operation. ‘If you feel the need to explain who I am, introduce me as your girlfriend. My name is Josephine. We’ve been staying in Berlin since Tuesday.’

  Gaddis shook his head and gazed out of the window in disbelief.

  ‘Sam, this is important.’ She turned in her seat to face him. ‘You need to concentrate. You need to pull yourself together. I know that you have misgivings about me. But we need to get this thing done. It’s the only way for you to get home with no questions asked.’

  ‘Have we enjoyed ourselves?’ he asked. A tone of macabre humour coloured the question. ‘Has it been fun spending time together? Do you think our relationship might lead to something more serious?’

  Des glanced across and caught Tanya’s eye.

  ‘This isn’t helpful, Sam.’ Tanya had barely slept. She was dressed in a smart blue suit and had the organizing, nervous energy of a woman with a lot on her mind. As soon as they landed in London, she was under orders to head directly to Vauxhall Cross for an emergency meeting with Brennan, who was ‘incensed’ that she had broken cover. ‘As I said last night, posing as a couple is the most sensible strategy.’

  ‘Of course.’ Gaddis made no attempt to disguise the contempt in his voice. ‘Your complicated love life.’

  They checked in at seven. In the security area, Gaddis was obliged to remove his boots and a leather belt from his jeans, but was glad to have something to occupy his hands as he queued in front of the scanner; it was the standing around, the waiting, which made him despondent and anxious. For the next fifteen minutes they loitered in a bookshop, flicking through paperbacks and guides to Berlin. Tanya occasionally attempted to engage Gaddis in polite conversation, but he knew that it was solely for cover and his replies were monosyllables of indifference. Forty minutes before they were due to take off, they made their way in silence along a series of strip-lit corridors to passport control.

  ‘I’ll do the talking,’ Tanya said, settling into the queue, but when the time came to approach the booth, their respective passports barely merited a glance from the customs official. At this early hour, they were simply waved through with a stifled yawn.

  Gaddis slept most of the way back but the brief rest did nothing to lighten his mood. Landing in London, the wretchedness of Friday’s events settled on him again. He thought continually of Charlotte and of the obliterated skull of Benedict Meisner. There was a driver waiting for them in Arrivals, another Des wearing a pair of jeans and a nylon anorak, holding a sign which said ‘JOSEPHINE WARNER’ in bold, handwritten capital letters. Gaddis saw it and felt a lurch of anger: the double-life was all around him. He longed to be free of it, to be in Barcelona with Min or away in Paris with Holly, to go back to the life he had known before Charlotte’s death.

  ‘You’re going to go home,’ Tanya told him when they had made their way to the car park at Gatwick and settled in the back seat of a bottle-green Vauxhall Astra. ‘There’s no need to come with us, no reason to fear for your safety. As far as we are aware, nobody else has been looking at your Internet traffic, nobody else has been listening to your phone calls. The man in the apartment was obviously waiting for Meisner. He was the next link in the chain after Charlotte and Somers. For some reason, the Russians don’t know about you. You should feel very grateful for that.’

  ‘Well, I guess that’s one advantage of having MI6 snooping around in your dustbins,’ Gaddis replied. It was a damp, featureless morning in England, no blue in the sky. ‘They can at least reassure you that they’re the only organization committing a flagrant breach of your privacy.’

  Tanya had grown accustomed to his fractious moods. She was sympathetic to them, but knew that she had a duty to toe the party line.

  ‘Look, Sam, I’m trying to tell you that this has worked out very well for you. You can go back to your life. You can live normally. It will be like none of it ever happened.’

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized the mistake. Gaddis turned on her.

  ‘I think Charlotte being murdered happened, Tanya.’

  ‘I know. That’s not what I meant, I’m sorry—’

  ‘Calvin Somers’s death happened.’

  She reached to touch his arm. ‘Sam—’

  ‘Last night, an innocent man lost his life because sixteen years ago he was dumb enough to go into business with MI6. Benedict Meisner’s assassination happened. How am I supposed to forget that? In what way can I go back to a “normal life”?’

  Tanya tried a different approach. ‘What I’m telling you is that you have to forget about it.’ She was under no illusions that things were going to be easy. ‘Just as you have to forget about the book. That’s the deal we’re making. That’s the only choice you’ve got.’

  Gaddis knew that there was no point in arguing with her. She was on her way to see the great and the good of MI6, men with sufficient influence to have his involvement in the shooting erased from the record. That was their speciality, after all - the rewriting of history. Tanya had promised that MI6 would ‘strike a deal with the Germans’. In return, all Gaddis had to do was stop digging around Edward Crane.

  ‘ATTILA is over,’ she said. ‘Crane will be moved from Winchester. Peter is going to lose his job. You won’t see either of them ever again.’

  They were crawling around the M25, boxed in by lorries and bored men in vans. Gaddis thought of Peter pulling him around the Hampshire countryside with a Sean Connery satnav for company and felt a sting of guilt that he would now be out of a job. ‘What if Crane tries to contact me?’ he asked. He hadn’t thought through the question; he had merely wanted to provoke a reaction in Tanya. But the thought gave him a glimpse of an idea. Had MI6 seen the hushmails? Might he still be able to communicate with Crane via an encrypted message?

  ‘Crane won’t try to contact you,’ Tanya replied, but there was no conviction in her voice.

  ‘How can you be sure?’ Gaddis was beginning to believe that he could save the book. It was extraordinary to him, but in spite of everything that had happened, he was determined to finish what he had started. ‘You think a man like that isn’t capable of deceiving MI6?’

  ‘I think Edward Crane is capable of anything.’

  ‘Precisely.’ He looked out of the window. He needed to give the impression that his interest in ATTILA was over, to lie with the same finesse that Tanya had shown in deceiving him. ‘Anywa
y, you have nothing to worry about. I understand my situation. If he calls, I’ll ignore him. I’d rather wash my hands of the whole thing.’

  ‘You would?’

  ‘Sure. What am I going to do, run the risk of getting shot by the FSB?’ Tanya acknowledged the inevitability of Russian involvement with a brisk nod. ‘I understand the terms of our deal.’

  He looked at her face, tiredness beginning to colour her eyes. It was strange, but it felt wrong to be deceiving her. The events in Berlin had forged a strange kind of bond between them.

  ‘I’ll go back to UCL,’ he said. ‘The book won’t get written. With any luck this will be the last time we ever see one another.’

  Chapter 31

  They dropped him at his house in Shepherd’s Bush and Gaddis found it just as he had left it a little more than a day earlier.

  But, of course, it was no longer the same house. It was now a house with tapped phones, a house with bugged rooms, a house with a computer that spoke to faceless geeks at Vauxhall Cross and GCHQ. He opened the curtains in the sitting room and looked out at the cars parked on the street. There was a van directly opposite his front door, a van with blacked-out windows.

  This is my future, he thought. This is the price of consorting with Edward Crane.

  In an act of petty defiance, he walked outside, banged on the panelling of the van, said: ‘Make mine with two sugars,’ then went down to Uxbridge Road, entered a phone box and dialled Peter’s number. The connection was dead. No message or sound. Just a void at the other end of the line. Hungry and strung out, he took a Tube to UCL, dealt with his post and emails, then bought a new jacket at a store on Great Marlborough Street from a teenage shop assistant who popped bubbles of gum as she ran his credit card through the till.

  He needed cash. He needed a new mobile phone. He needed to find a way of living his life which would restore some degree of privacy to his punctured existence. Nowadays everything left a trail: there would be number plate recognition on his car; alerts on his Oyster card; triggers every time he used a bank account. Gaddis would have to assume, at least in the first few weeks of his arrangement with Tanya, that MI6 would continue to watch him, to ensure that he did not break his word. His calls, his emails, his movements around London would all be monitored by an army of watchers whom he would never sense, never identify, never see.