The Trinity Six (2011)

by Charles Cumming

  ‘Sounds like you were,’ Tanya replied. Her irritation with Miklos was still palpable. He had plainly crossed a professional boundary. Gaddis wondered what was so precious about the watch and why Miklos hadn’t simply told him to wear it on his wrist.

  ‘There’s information inside it,’ Tanya said, as if she had heard the question.

  ‘In the back of the watch? In the mechanism?’

  ‘There is no mechanism. It’s a false casing. The less you know, the better.’

  ‘Very James Bond.’

  ‘Very.’

  They walked the short distance to the car park. Tanya’s muddy VW Golf was parked on the upper level of a clogged multi-storey. Gaddis recognised it from Kew.

  ‘Talking of presents,’ she said, ‘I’ve got something for you.’

  Gaddis was standing behind her as she popped the catch on the boot. He could hardly believe his eyes. Somehow, Tanya had managed to retrieve his overnight bag from the Goldene Spinne.

  ‘How the hell did you get that back?’ he asked. He opened it to find his suit, his clothes, his house keys and wallet all packed inside.

  ‘Eva got them,’ she replied. ‘DHL to Gatwick did the rest.’

  He surprised himself by reaching out and kissing her on the cheek. Tanya did not seem to object. ‘You’re a miracle worker.’

  ‘We do our best, Doctor. I used up a few favours. I’m just glad you’re back in one piece.’

  It was only when they were inside the car, heading north towards the M25, that she asked what had happened in Vienna. Gaddis described the scene at the Kleines Cafe, his long night in the city, the journey with Eva and his time with Miklos and Viki in Budapest.

  ‘I owe you an apology,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have gone to Vienna. I didn’t think the Russians were following me.’

  ‘They most probably weren’t.’

  He was surprised by this.

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘I can’t. But only a handful of people knew that Wilkinson was going to be in Austria. Who alerted the Russians? Who tipped them off? He’s lived peacefully on the South Island of New Zealand for more than a decade. Why do they suddenly come looking for him now?’

  ‘Maybe they wanted me.’

  Tanya produced a brief, one-note laugh. ‘Believe me, Sam, if the Russians wanted to kill you, they would have done it already. Vienna was a specific hit on Wilkinson. It was just lucky you were in the bathroom.’

  He concluded that this was the moment to tell her what Wilkinson had revealed.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘There’s something you should know.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Bob told me something before he was killed. Something that explains everything that has happened.’

  He realized that he trusted her completely now. It was a total reversal. He did not even think twice about the consequences of what he was going to say.

  Tanya looked across at him. ‘Tell me, Sam.’

  ‘Sergei Platov tried to defect in 1988.’

  She almost swerved on to the hard shoulder. ‘What?’

  ‘He went to MI6. He gave Wilkinson ATTILA’s identity as proof that he was serious. He was disenchanted with life in the KGB and wanted to make something of himself. Didn’t think he was valued highly enough by his superiors.’

  ‘So he tried to come over? Jesus.’ Tanya was nodding to herself. ‘That explains the killings,’ she said. ‘Everybody who knows about this has been assassinated.’

  ‘Except for Brennan.’ Gaddis had been chain-smoking since the airport. He slotted a third cigarette butt through a small gap in the window and watched it whistle past the door. ‘Your boss must have something on Platov. They must have come to some kind of arrangement. Tretiak and Wilkinson were both killed. Crane knew about Dresden as well, which explains why Brennan had him sent to St Mary’s in ‘92. You’ve never heard this?’

  ‘Of course I’ve never heard it.’ Tanya was such an accomplished liar that he could not tell whether or not her reaction was genuine. ‘Do you have any idea what it would do to Platov’s career if this became public knowledge?’

  ‘No shit.’ Gaddis went for another cigarette and was about to press the lighter when Tanya said: ‘Is there any chance you could not smoke? Just for five minutes? I feel like I’m driving an ashtray.’

  He replaced the cigarette. ‘So why has MI6 kept it a secret? Surely once Platov rose through the ranks, his file was opened up and his defection became common know ledge? Surely Brennan or one of his predecessors must have reported what happened?’

  Tanya shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘Number one, exposing Platov would have exposed ATTILA, and the Office has never wanted anybody knowing that we had another Cambridge spy on the books. It took thirty years to get our reputation back. We’re not about to throw it away again.’

  ‘But Eddie was a bloody hero. He was the greatest double agent in the history of Anglo-Russian espionage. Isn’t that a triumph to be celebrated?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Tanya was a member of the new generation of twenty-first-century spies: post-Cold War, post-9/11, post-ideological. Her attachment to the old ways was by no means an article of faith. ‘But where’s the proof of Platov’s defection? It would just be our word against his. The Russians would write it off as crude propaganda, an influence operation.’

  Gaddis was silenced. ‘Influence operation.’ The secret language of the secret world. He closed the window and found himself thinking about Min. He had wondered, in the depths of the Viennese night, whether he would ever see his daughter again.

  ‘Wilkinson told me that he interviewed Platov in a safe house in Berlin in the presence of John Brennan.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He said the safe house was “wired up”. Does that mean he would have recorded the interview? Videotaped it?’

  ‘Recorded certainly.’ Tanya was clearly intrigued. ‘I don’t know about video. If it was the late eighties, perhaps. The technology would certainly have existed to use a concealed camera in low light.’

  ‘What would have happened to those tapes after the interview? Would they be kept in a vault at Vauxhall Cross?’

  ‘Doubtful. If the tape ever made it to London in a diplomatic bag, it would have been destroyed by Brennan.’

  Gaddis twisted in his seat. He was on to something.

  ‘There are tapes in the boxes Holly gave me, tapes in Katya’s files.’ His voice had quickened. ‘What if the interview is on one of them?’

  ‘Keep talking.’

  ‘Before I went to the bathroom, Wilkinson quoted Morecambe and Wise at me. You’re playing the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order. I thought it was just a joke at first, but he said that I wasn’t looking at the files in the right way. What if Katya’s material isn’t a paper trail? What if it’s something else? What if the smoking gun is a tape?’

  Tanya braked suddenly as a van swerved out in front of her. Gaddis swore, because his nerves were still on edge. The car beside them sounded its horn and he looked across, lip-reading the driver shouting out in anger.

  ‘I’m not sure I follow you,’ she said.

  ‘What if Wilkinson made a copy of the tape and sent it to Katya along with the other documents, hoping that she would make use of it?’

  ‘That’s a big “if”.’

  ‘But just say she did.’

  ‘Then the Russians have probably stolen it. Or it’s lost. Or they’ve lobbed a Molotov Cocktail through your sitting-room window and burned down your house.’

  Gaddis ignored the joke. ‘Let’s go there now,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to my house and go through the boxes.’

  ‘Not going to happen.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Come on, Sam. It would be suicidal. Doronin gave your description to the FSB. They’re probably sitting outside your house as we speak. The minute you show your face in Shepherd’s Bush, they’ll come for you.’
>
  ‘Then why are we on the M25 heading back into London?’

  ‘Because I’m taking you to a safe house.’

  Gaddis felt an odd mixture of relief and despair: relief that Tanya was guaranteeing him some measure of safety; despair that he was being forced out of his home.

  ‘How dangerous can it be?’ he said. ‘Let’s just poke our heads round the door. I need a change of clothes anyway. All my papers are there, my stuff for work. It would take five minutes.’

  ‘No,’ Tanya replied.

  ‘So that’s it?’ He felt a sudden anger, confronted by the stark limits which would now be imposed on his life. ‘I can’t go home? That’s the directive from MI6?’

  ‘It’s not coming from MI6.’

  ‘Then who’s it coming from?’

  ‘Me.’

  He had been on the point of extracting a cigarette, on instinct, but again returned the packet to his coat.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Brennan wants you out of the picture.’ Tanya almost spat the words, as if she could not believe what she was saying. ‘You’re a thorn in his side.’ Gaddis could see the conflict in her, the doubt. ‘I’m going to take care of you for a few days. I’m worried that it might have been Brennan who tipped the Russians off about Wilkinson. And I didn’t apply for this job so that my boss could betray his own people to the Kremlin and put innocent lives at risk.’

  There was a moment in which he thought that she was playing him again. Her words sounded heartfelt, but the stark admission was so out of character that he wondered if the whole thing was rehearsed. It was a habit Gaddis had developed, a safety valve to avoid being manipulated. But when he took her hand in his, he knew that Tanya was utterly serious. He could sense it by the way she glanced at him quickly and then looked away. She squeezed his hand back, then released it, the reassurance of a friend. Was her theory possible? It was an astonishing accusation, yet Brennan had every motive to betray Wilkinson. Gaddis turned around and looked behind his chair. Dry cleaning was folded on the back seat of the Renault, a tin of Roses chocolates spilled open on the floor. This was her vehicle, her operation. He thought of Eva, of football boots and children.

  ‘Let’s go to my house,’ he said, as if they were starting the conversation all over again.

  ‘You’re not listening to me. It’s pointless going after the tape. Your story will never come out. It will never be allowed to come out. The government will slap a D notice on the Crane book before you’ve typed the opening paragraph.’

  Gaddis seized on this.

  ‘I don’t believe that. I think that’s just a line you’re feeding yourself to get out of what you know we have to do. Take a look at Platov, Tanya. Isn’t it time for a change of scene in Moscow, a change of personnel?’ She shook her head, but it was the reflex of a bureaucrat. ‘Look at his record. Platov has taken Russia to within a few years of outright totalitarianism. Innocent civilians are being killed to justify illegal wars overseas. Exiles are murdered in foreign cities to silence dissent. Newspaper editors with the nerve to challenge the orthodoxy are left to die in hospital. Fuck the D Notice. If we can get hold of that tape and get it broadcast, even if it’s just on the Internet, we have the power to put that scumbag out of office.’

  Tanya was gliding past a convertible MG.

  ‘Five minutes,’ she said. ‘That’s it. That all I’m giving you. Five minutes.’

  Chapter 50

  They parked three hundred metres from Gaddis’s front door, at the northern end of the street.

  ‘This isn’t my house,’ he said.

  ‘I’m aware of that. What number are you?’

  ‘I thought you knew everything about me, Josephine. You must be getting sloppy.’

  Tanya explained that she would walk down the street and check for surveillance around Gaddis’s house. If there were Russian or British watchers positioned outside - in vehicles, in a first- or second-floor stakeout, dressed as street cleaners or parking attendants - she would be able to identify them.

  ‘Give me ten minutes,’ she said and stepped out of the car.

  Gaddis smoked a cigarette while he waited. He saw one of his neighbours coming towards him, a widow walking her poodle, and ducked down in his seat, scrabbling around on the floor of the Renault until she had passed. Tanya came back just as he was dropping the cigarette butt into a storm drain.

  ‘Everything seems clear,’ she said, starting the engine. ‘I walked up to Uxbridge Road, came back down the other side, had a look around. But they may have a trigger on your front door. If you go in, it will tell them you’re back and they’ll send somebody round faster than the time it’s taking me to tell you about it. So you don’t have long. Get the tape, get your papers, get your toothbrush and your razor, then get out of there.’

  She drove up to the house. Gaddis was obliged to negotiate a hop-scotch of pavement gob and dog turds en route to his front door, deposited by boxer dogs and uncastrated Dobermans whose owners used the street as a rat run between White City and the pubs and betting shops on Uxbridge Road. He put the larger of his two house keys into the Chubb lock and turned it, as he had turned it a thousand times before. He inserted the Yale and lifted the latch. His frayed nerves half-expected the obliteration of an explosion, the scream of an alarm, but the door opened and he found himself in the hall of his house, home again.

  There was a small package on the doormat, addressed to Dr Sam Gaddis ‘BY HAND’, next to a bank statement and some junk mail. He went into the sitting room and walked straight towards the files in the corner of the kitchen. They may have a trigger on your front door. He turned each of the boxes upside-down so that their contents sprayed across the floor. It was like watching stones sliding on ice. Everywhere he looked there was paper. Gaddis could not remember which of the boxes contained the tapes and looked around in increasing desperation for signs of a package or cassette.

  Wilkinson’s letter to Katya was still on the kitchen table, which he took as a sign that no one had broken into the house during his absence. There were two other boxes in the corner of the room, jammed up against the door which led out into the garden. Gaddis pulled open the cardboard flaps, inverted the boxes and again allowed the contents to pour out on to the floor.

  Straight away he heard the clatter of a VHS cassette, saw it and picked it up. It was not labelled, but looked unscathed. He set it to one side and reached for the second box. He could feel how light it was in comparison with the others. He looked inside. There were just three pieces of A4 paper and - hidden beneath these - a blank BASF music cassette with ‘Prokofiev’ written down one side in faded blue biro.

  He was sure that this was it: an audio recording of the interview with Platov. The VHS was also promising. Though relatively unmarked, it could have been a copy of the original film shot in the safe house in Berlin. He grabbed a plastic bag from a stash under the sink, put the tapes inside it and headed for the front door.

  He stopped just as he was reaching for the latch. Gaddis turned and looked back at the house. Min had crawled up those stairs. The books in the hall were the books he had bought and shared with Natasha. In that sitting room, he had eaten dinner with friends, watched England win the Ashes. It was a place of memories. And now he would have to give it up. If what Tanya was saying was true - and he had no reason to doubt her now - the house would have to be put up for sale. That was the price of consorting with Edward Crane. That was the price of a blood feud with the FSB.

  He picked up his post, put the package in the plastic bag alongside the tapes, opened the door and walked back out to the car.

  Chapter 51

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘Two tapes,’ he said and took them out of the plastic bag. Tanya pulled away towards Uxbridge Road.

  ‘What’s on them?’

  ‘One of them is a tape with “Prokofiev” written down the side. The other is a blank VHS. Is there a video machine at the safe house?’

  ‘Probably.’
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br />   They headed west, through the gridlock of the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, then south in the direction of Kensington High Street. The pavements were crowded with families heading home at the tail end of the long afternoon, mothers and fathers doing their Sunday thing. On Earl’s Court Road, Tanya turned left into Lexham Gardens.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Gaddis asked.

  ‘Patience.’

  She drove into a narrow mews and parked beside a black four-by-four with tinted windows. An elderly couple wearing bottle-green Huskies were coming out of a house three doors down. They looked up and spotted Tanya.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ said the woman, raising an emaciated hand. Her husband, who was using a walking stick and looked even older than Edward Crane, struggled to lift his head as he greeted her.

  ‘You know those people?’ Gaddis whispered. He wondered how secure the safe house could be if members of the Secret Intelligence Service were on nodding terms with its neighbours.

  ‘Friends of mine,’ she said.

  Her reply made sense as soon as they walked into the house. Gaddis saw a photograph on a side table and reacted in disbelief; it was a picture of Tanya with her arms around another man. This wasn’t a safe house. This was her home. The man in the photograph was her fiance.

  ‘You live here?’

  ‘I live here.’

  ‘Is that a good idea?’

  ‘You don’t like Kensington?’

  ‘I meant, is it a good idea to be inviting me back to your house?’

  ‘It’s fine for the time being.’ She closed the door behind them, hooked up the security chain and slid a bolt across the top of the door. It was a first, symbolic indication of Gaddis’s confinement. ‘We can work something else out tomorrow.’

  He did not know whether to be alarmed by the fact that Tanya had no access to a safe house or grateful to her that she was prepared to risk her wellbeing in order to provide him with sanctuary. He looked again at the photograph, fascinated by the man who had won her heart.