The Trinity Six (2011)

by Charles Cumming

  A siren blasted in the near-distance, matched instantly by a second vehicle, tearing towards the Kleines Cafe.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ he asked her again. ‘Company orders?’

  ‘I don’t know why you think I had anything to do with this. Where are you? Tell me what’s going on.’

  He could almost believe in her innocence. He wanted to believe in it. But there was no trust left between them. He said: ‘How am I supposed to know? I went to the bathroom, I left Wilkinson sitting at a table, next thing I know he’s been killed. You tell me what happened. You’re probably in fucking Vienna. You tell me how the hell they found out where he was.’

  ‘Sam. Listen to me.’ Tanya had composed herself. She was suddenly preternaturally calm. ‘This is what I was worried about. I thought you were still in Spain. What is this number you’re calling from? Is it a new mobile?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Hang up. Switch it off and take out the battery. Get at least a mile away from where you are, find a public phone and call me back. Do that.’

  ‘What?’

  But she had already broken the connection. Gaddis spoke against the dead line, but Tanya was gone. He concealed himself in the recess of an apartment block entrance and stared at the screen. She was obviously worried that the Russians had a fix on his mobile. But was she genuinely trying to protect him, or just buying time in which to call John Brennan? Either way, he knew that he had no option other than to do as Tanya had instructed. He turned off the phone, his nail digging hard into the power switch, slid back the casing and removed the battery. He then placed the battery in his pocket, jogged down on to Schubertring and hailed a cab.

  He fell into the back seat, unbalanced as a drunk, the driver staring at him in the rear-view mirror, waiting to be told where to go. Gaddis realized that he knew of no address, no destination in Vienna beyond the Goldene Spinne Hotel and the Ferris Wheel at the Prater. It was surely madness to go to the hotel and the Prater would be closed at this time of night. On an instinct, he blurted out ‘Hotel Sacher’ because it was the only other landmark in Vienna that he could think of. The driver made a noise at the base of his throat which was at once irritated and amused and within two short minutes Gaddis understood why: the Sacher was three blocks away. He could have walked there in under five minutes.

  ‘My mistake,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry,’ though there was no indication that the driver spoke any English. ‘I didn’t mean the Sacher. Can you take me to Sudbahnhof?’

  The driver now turned in his seat, a middle-aged man at the end of a long shift who didn’t much feel like being messed around by a drunk British tourist. ‘Sudbahnhof?’ he said, as if Gaddis had asked him to drive to the moon. ‘No trains now.’

  ‘I’m meeting somebody,’ Gaddis replied and within an instant the driver had sighed and engaged first gear and swung out into the street, zipping through green lights towards the southern section of the city. They did not speak again. After a few minutes, Gaddis spotted a phone booth at the side of the road and instructed him to pull over.

  ‘Halt, bitte.’

  ‘This not station,’ the driver muttered.

  ‘I don’t care. Pull over.’

  He paid him, a ten-euro note thrust through the window and no time to wait for the change. The pavement was covered in a puddle of thin mud which splashed against his shoes as he walked towards the payphone. There were no people in sight. The phone was covered in stickers, the box scratched by coins and knives. He dialled Tanya’s mobile.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘I’m in a phone booth.’

  ‘Listen to me very carefully. We don’t have long. If your number was compromised, mine is too. It’s not safe for you out there. We’re going to get you out of Austria. Exfiltration. If they came for Wilkinson, they will come for you.’

  Gaddis, stunned, did not respond. Tanya mistook his silence for scepticism.

  ‘Think about it. The police will almost certainly get a good description of whoever was sitting with Wilkinson tonight. They’ll be looking for you. You can’t go back to your hotel. That would be suicide. You can’t rent a car. You can’t go to a train station or out to the airport. The last thing we need is Sam Gaddis being taken into the custody of the Austrian police.’

  He wondered why Tanya had started to refer to him in the third person. Is that how spooks operated? They turned you into a concept, an ‘asset’, anything to convince themselves that they weren’t dealing with a human being.

  ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘the last thing Sam Gaddis wants right now is to be taken into the custody of the Austrian police.’

  ‘Good. Then listen. Do you still have your regular mobile phone?’

  ‘No. I left it in Barcelona. Everything else is back at my hotel.’

  ‘Don’t, whatever you do, go back there.’ He could see the logic in that request, but a stubborn part of his nature was still convinced that he had time to go back to the hotel, to pack his belongings and to leave Vienna. ‘It’s the first place they’ll wait,’ she said. ‘Do you have your passport?’

  ‘Tanya, everything is in my room. I came out tonight with a notebook, a pen, a packet of cigarettes. No, I don’t have my passport, I don’t even have my wallet. I’ve got about eighty euros in cash and a Tube pass. That’s it.’

  A frustrated silence. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she replied eventually. ‘I need to clear this line. We need to stop talking. Get away from wherever you are and try to go somewhere safe. Find a basement. Find a bar or a nightclub. Go somewhere where you can disappear until five o’clock.’

  ‘What happens at five o’clock?’

  ‘What happens is that you’ll turn on your mobile for as long as it takes me to send you the instructions for your exfiltration. You have to trust me, Sam. Don’t go back to your hotel. We can arrange to have your stuff picked up. Go to another part of the city. Lie low for three hours. At five o’clock, I will send the instructions. As soon as you’ve received them, switch off your phone and do everything that I have told you. Understood?’

  He was at once perplexed and yet humbled by her willingness to help him.

  ‘Understood.’

  Chapter 44

  Gaddis replaced the receiver. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. He was standing on a deserted street in a city that he did not know, wanted by the Austrian police, pursued by the Russian secret service, at the mercy of a British spy who had consistently lied to him about her identity. This is what his life had come to. He felt as if he had been on the run for months. He tried to remember what he had been doing at the exact same time the previous year and realized that he had been in Spain, in a seaside village about an hour north of Barcelona, trying to teach Min how to swim. He managed to smile briefly at the comparison but the memory did little to calm his frazzled nerves.

  What to do now? Walking away from the phone booth, cutting down a side street, Gaddis tried to will within himself a determination not to fail. There was no time to feel sorry for himself, no time to panic. This was now a game of survival, a challenge which he had to face. Arriving at this conclusion did not feel like a particularly courageous act; it was simply that he had no choice.

  It began to rain. A cab hissed by and Gaddis hailed it, instructing the driver to take him to the International Centre on the north side of the Danube. It was the address he should have given on his first journey, a landmark building in Vienna which was home to both the United Nations and to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The journey would take at least fifteen minutes and give him time to assess his options in the back of a car, away from prying eyes. He knew that the Russians had pinpointed either himself or Wilkinson to the Kleines Cafe. He also knew that Wilkinson’s death had been pre-meditated. But why had the assassin spared his life? Had he waited for Gaddis to go to the bathroom, or intended to kill both men, only to find Wilkinson sitting alone at the table? There was no way of knowing.

  The rain was falling harder now. The driver slowed
on approach to a bridge, stopping briefly at a set of traffic lights before crossing the Danube at speed. To the east, in the near-distance, Gaddis could see moored river boats and, beyond those, the dimmed lights of the Prater amusement park. He wondered what Tanya would do with the information he had given her. Tell Brennan, who would surely instruct her to abandon Gaddis to his fate, or keep her word and find some way of getting him out of Vienna? He remembered the word she had used on the phone. Exfiltration. It was as if he was some Cold War political renegade, a dissident or agent provocateur who needed to be spirited across the border. How had it come to this? For a moment he wondered if Tanya was over-reacting and thought of instructing the driver to turn around and take him back to the Goldene Spinne. Why couldn’t he just pick up his passport, pack his bags and take the first flight out of Vienna? But, of course, that was crazy. Every move he now made, every decision he took, was fraught with risk.

  The cab raced south-east along a two-lane highway and, within minutes, had pulled up outside the UN building, a scifi compound of fountains and concrete walkways, drenched in rain. Now the obvious question arose. What the hell was he going to do for the next couple of hours? Get out and walk around?

  ‘Is there a bar near here?’ he asked the driver. ‘A nightclub?’

  It was the option which made most sense: to disappear into a crowded after-hours club, to find a secluded corner and to bide his time until 5 a.m. But the driver merely grunted and shrugged his shoulders. It wasn’t clear whether he had failed to understand the question or simply knew of nowhere suitable to suggest. Gaddis looked out of the window at the pouring rain, at the security guards in their strip-lit booths. He noticed a police car parked on the opposite side of the street, apparently unoccupied.

  ‘Sprechen Sie Englisch?’ he said, but again the driver merely grunted and shrugged. There was an odd kind of childishness in his behaviour. Gaddis tried again. ‘Ich bin ein club finden,’ he said, fudging the language and adding to his sense of embarrassment by miming a dance in the back seat. ‘Club? Dancing? Ist ein bar?’

  ‘Hier? Nein,’ the driver muttered, tapping the wheel. Gaddis felt foolish. The radio was on and he wondered if reports of Wilkinson’s murder would soon filter through to the local news. As Tanya had said, it was possible that the police had already assembled a vague description of the middle-aged man who was seen drinking with the victim, a tourist with dark brown hair, around six feet tall and wearing a dark jacket. Gaddis would be regarded as a suspect or, at best, an accomplice. He had vanished moments after the killing and conveniently abandoned the table just as the killer was approaching. He said: ‘Bar,’ again to the driver, this time with more urgency in his voice and the vehicle pulled away from the kerb.

  ‘Danke,’ Gaddis told him.

  The cab turned through one hundred and eighty degrees, passing within a few metres of the police car. Suddenly, behind the rain-obscured windscreen, Gaddis saw a shadow move in the front seat. There was somebody inside the car. The headlights switched on and the police vehicle moved out into the road behind them. Gaddis felt a wretched sense of bad luck, sure in the knowledge that he would now be pulled over and questioned. How was he going to explain what he was doing at the UN at two forty-five in the morning? It was one of the most sensitive buildings in western Europe, watched round the clock by police and security. It was stupid to have told the driver to come here, sloppy thinking. Why hadn’t he just gone straight to a bar? Now a random Austrian cop, some pre-adolescent cadet twiddling his thumbs on the night shift, held it in his power to bring the entire Crane investigation to a halt.

  ‘You want nightclub?’ the driver asked, but Gaddis was too distracted by the police car to absorb what he had been asked.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I say, you want nightclub?’

  He was startled to hear broken English. ‘Ja, ja,’ he replied, feeling that they were suddenly allies lined up against the might of the Austrian police force. The cab re-joined the two-lane highway running perpendicular to the Danube, the policeman trailing them at a distance of no more than twenty metres. ‘Nightclub gut,’ Gaddis said. He looked through the back window, the wipers on the police vehicle slicing against the rain.

  ‘Problem?’ the driver asked.

  Gaddis turned back to face him. ‘No, no problem. Kein Problem.’

  Now the cop was alongside them, running parallel with the taxi. Gaddis could hear the fizz of tyres on the wet road. The driver’s face was obscured in the darkness, yet Gaddis was sure that he saw him turn briefly and look across into the cab. It was surely only a matter of time before a siren was switched on and the taxi gestured on to the hard shoulder.

  But, to Gaddis’s intense relief, the police car suddenly pulled off into the distance, accelerating to top speed in the darkness. Within moments his own driver had made a turn back on to the bridge and the cab was soon depositing him outside a nightclub in the centre of Vienna. Gaddis had no idea what district he was in, nor what sort of club he had been taken to, but paid the driver forty euros nonetheless and thanked him for his trouble.

  It turned out to be the perfect place to lie low. For the next two hours, he was able to sit at an anonymous corner table in a dimly lit basement bar which thudded with the sort of music he heard all the time at UCL and which he could never successfully identify. A waitress kept up a constant supply of nuts and Polish beer and he smoked with impunity because the ban was being flouted seemingly by every customer in the place. There were pretty girls on the dance floor and clean-cut men wearing chinos and ironed blue shirts trying their best to seduce them. They looked like the future CEOs of Saatchis and the World Bank. At one point, Gaddis was sure that he spotted two of the guests from the wedding, but they did not appear to recognize him and left soon after four o’clock.

  Just after four-thirty, as the last of the customers were being thrown out, Gaddis attached himself to a group of students stumbling drunk into the morning. At the top of the stairs, he turned away from them and decided to walk for a few blocks in search of a secluded spot where he could wait until five. The rain had stopped and he began to look around for a cash machine, only to realize that any transaction he made would instantly give away his position to any interested party with a track on his credit cards. Some of the paranoia and anxiousness he had felt before entering the club now began to return. The sun had come up, bringing a low blue light to deserted streets still damp from the early-morning rain. Three times Gaddis looked at his watch, only to find the time creeping towards five o’clock with a maddening slowness. He felt that his body language, his entire demeanour as he walked, was a living clue to his guilt. Any passer-by would surely notice this strange foreigner, walking the streets to no discernible purpose, turning around too frequently, looking nervously down every alleyway and street. Gaddis was conscious of moving his hands incessantly in and out of his pockets, of touching his face and hair. He was finding it impossible to relax.

  Eventually, pulling out the last of his cigarettes, he turned into a straggly park populated by dogs and restless pigeons and settled on a bench to smoke. He would get through the cigarette, then switch on the phone, waiting for Tanya’s instructions. He had no passport, no change of clothes, no means of contacting his friends or colleagues, other than by using a mobile phone which, when switched on, would give away his position like a fire lit suddenly in the darkness of a valley. The isolation was total.

  He stubbed out the cigarette. The park was overlooked by a concrete flak tower smothered in incomprehensible graffiti. A relic of the Second World War. Gaddis took out the phone and switched it on. The simple act of pressing the power button felt like an admission of defeat, as if he was deliberately surrendering to the inevitability of his own capture. He listened to the innocent pings and melodies of the phone as it booted up and felt sure that, within moments, an army of jackbooted militia would come tearing down the street to arrest him. He stared at the phone’s tiny screen. He was at the mercy of a piece of
technology smaller than his own hand. The system appeared to have locked on to a signal, with five full bars of reception. But nothing was happening. No text from Tanya. No missed call. Nothing.

  A minute passed, two. Gaddis looked at his watch repeatedly. It was already almost five past five. How long could he afford to keep the phone switched on? He wondered if he had misunderstood Tanya’s instructions and booted up either an hour too early or an hour too late. Had she meant five o’clock Austrian time, or five o’clock in London? Across the park, a woman was stretching her back beside a set of children’s swings. Two hundred metres to her left, half-obscured by a screen of trees, two men appeared to be eating breakfast in the front seat of a car. Everybody now was a potential surveillance operative or paid assassin. Gaddis wondered if he would ever again be free of this constant paranoia.

  The phone beeped. Gaddis plunged to it with a manic relief.

  CUCKOO CLOCK. DIZZY MOUSE.

  He spoke aloud to himself: ‘What?’ and looked again at the screen. It made no sense. Cuckoo clock? Dizzy mouse? What did Tanya mean? He had been expecting detailed instructions, the address of a safe house in Vienna, at the very least the timetable of trains leaving for Prague or Zurich. Not this. Not four apparently meaningless words in the small hours of the morning.

  Cuckoo clock. His mind went to work. It was plainly a code. Tanya was trying to conceal her instructions from third parties who might be looking in. She could not afford to risk anybody knowing where MI6 were intending to meet him. That meant that she was speaking directly to Gaddis, using what she knew about him to create a private language which only he would understand. Dizzy Mouse. What did that mean? Was there more to come? He waited another thirty seconds for any further messages, but the mobile remained frustratingly inert. He knew that he had to switch it off and did so as he stood up off the bench, walking quickly out of the park.

  Cuckoo clock. It was a reference to Switzerland. Was he supposed to head west, for the Alps? Or was the Cuckoo Clock a bar or cafe in Vienna? But Tanya wouldn’t be so literal. If such a bar existed, it would be the first place that anybody would think to wait for him.