The Trinity Six Part 13

'Sam Gaddis. It's a personal call.'

'Could you hold?'

Before Gaddis had a chance to say 'Of course', the line went dead and he was left holding the receiver, wondering if the connection had been lost. Then, just as he was on the point of hanging up and re-dialling, a man picked up, coughing to clear his throat.

'Mr Gaddis?'

'Yes.'

'You're looking for Calvin?'

'That's right.'

Gaddis heard the awful hollow pause which precedes bad news.

'Could I ask what your relationship was with him?'

'I'm not sure that I understand the question.' Gaddis instinctively knew that something was wrong, and regretted sounding obstructive. 'Calvin was helping me with some research on an academic thesis. I'm a lecturer at UCL. Is everything all right?'

'I am very sorry to tell you that Calvin has been involved in a terrible incident. He was mugged on his way home from work. Attacked, you might say. I'm surprised you didn't see the reports in the newspapers. The police are treating it as murder.'

Chapter 24.

Gaddis was standing in the same room in which he had learned of Charlotte's death, but his reaction on this occasion was quite different. He hung up the phone, turned towards the shelves of books which lined one side of his cramped office and experienced a sensation of pure fear. For a long time he was almost motionless, his stalled brain trying to deny the inescapable logic of what he had been told. If Calvin Somers had been murdered, Charlotte had most probably been killed by the same a.s.sailants. That meant that his own life was in danger and that Neame and Ludmilla Tretiak were also threatened. Gaddis found that he began to think about himself in the third person, as an ent.i.ty separate and distinct from his own familiar, protected existence; it was some kind of brain trick, an atavistic impulse to deny the truth of his predicament. But the truth was inescapable. Whoever had killed Somers would now surely direct their attention towards him.

He continued to stare blankly at the bookshelves, his eyes jumping from spine to spine. Should he go to the police? Could he claim that Charlotte had been murdered? Who would believe him? There had been no evidence of foul play at the house in Hampstead. Charlotte had a weak heart and an unhealthy lifestyle; that was it. Besides, she had been cremated; it was too late to carry out an autopsy. Gaddis did not know why Somers had been killed or who had perpetrated the act. His best guess was Russian intelligence, but why murder a man simply for knowing that Edward Crane's death had been faked by MI6? The British themselves might be involved, but would they kill one of their own citizens simply for breaking the terms of the Official Secrets Act? It didn't seem likely.

He tried to clear his mind. He tried to be logical. Fact: the Russian espiocracy was systematically eradicating anybody with links to ATTILA. But if that was the case, why had the emba.s.sy in London given him a tourist visa ten days earlier, no questions asked, allowing him to pa.s.s unchecked through Sheremetyevo? This small thought offered Gaddis a brief moment of solace until he realized that there was every chance the FSB could have deliberately allowed him to fly into Russia in order to follow him around Moscow and to isolate his contacts. If that was the case, he would have led them straight to Ludmilla. Turning from the bookshelves, he opened the window of his office, inhaled a lungful of dank London air and stared up at a black, pre-rain sky. It felt as though he had no moves left; the conspiracy was too large, the main players either dead or far beyond his reach. Who could he talk to who might be able to shed light on what was happening?

Neame.

Gaddis grabbed his jacket and bag, locked his office and took the Tube to Waterloo. He called Peter from a phone box near the ticket hall but the number still wasn't picking up. A Winchester train, scheduled for 11.39, was sitting on Platform 6, adjacent to a Guildford service which departed five minutes later. With what he hoped would be a successful tactic for shaking off any surveillance, Gaddis walked on to the Guildford train, sat on a fold-down chair beside the automatic doors, then moved quickly across the platform at 11.38 to join the Winchester service. He was not able to determine whether or not he had been followed, but the train moved off within thirty seconds and he sat back in his seat with the dawning realization that his life was about to take on a quality of evasion and trickery for which he was far from prepared.

An hour later he was trying Peter again from a phone box outside Winchester station. This time, he picked up. The sound of his voice felt like the first piece of good fortune Gaddis had experienced in weeks.

'Peter? It's Sam. I need to see our friend. Now Now.'

'I'll call you back.'

The line went dead. Gaddis was left standing in a phone booth which stank of p.i.s.s and unwashed men. He opened the door to allow fresh air to funnel inside from the road and as he waited, leaning his body against the worn, age-frosted gla.s.s, he realized that he was no longer pursuing Crane for the money. This wasn't about alimony any more, or tax bills or school fees. It was purely a question of survival; without the book in the public domain, he was a dead man.

The phone rang. Gaddis grabbed at the receiver before the first ring had even finished.

'Sam?'

'Yes?'

'It's not going to be possible today. Afraid the old man's not feeling too good. Head cold.'

Ordinarily, Gaddis would have been polite enough to offer his sympathy, but not this time. Instead he forced the point, raising his voice to impress upon Peter the importance of setting up the meeting.

'I don't really give a s.h.i.t if he's feeling unwell. When he hears what I have to tell him, believe me, he'll be relieved he's only got a cold.'

'It's more than that, I'm afraid.' Peter was calmly changing his story. 'Running a temperature, as well. Confined to his bed at the home.'

'And where is the home?'

'I'm afraid I can't tell you that.'

'Can you tell me this, then? Can you tell me why Calvin Somers has been murdered?'

'Calvin who?'

'Never mind.' There was no point entering into an argument with Neame's gatekeeper, no matter how much satisfaction it might have given Gaddis to vent his anger. Instead, he asked if he had a pen.

'I do.'

'Then write this down. Tell Tom that Calvin Somers has been killed.' He spelled out the name. 'Charlotte Berg was also murdered. The way things are going, Tom could be next.'

'Jesus.' It was the first time that Gaddis had sensed Peter losing his cool. 'You're not leading these people to us, are you, Sam?'

Gaddis ignored the question. 'There's more,' he said. 'Ludmilla Tretiak' again, he had to spell out the name 'has been personally instructed by Sergei Platov never to discuss ATTILA. Tretiak is almost certainly under FSB surveil-lance. There's a link with Crane's time in Dresden, but I'm not sure what it is. Ask Tom if he can find anything in the memoirs about Crane's activities in East Germany in the late 1980s. Charlotte's computer hard drives were deliberately wiped. Somebody knew that she was on to Crane. Tell him all of this.'

'It sounds like something you should be telling him in person,' Peter replied, and for a moment Gaddis thought that he had breached his defences sufficiently for a meeting to be arranged. But he was to be disappointed. 'I just don't think Tom's going to be up to this for the next couple of days. Any chance you could be down here at the weekend?'

'I'm going to Berlin at the weekend,' Gaddis replied. He had made the decision on the train and would rack up the cost on a credit card. Benedict Meisner was now his sole remaining chance of a breakthrough. 'Monday?'

'Monday,' Peter confirmed. 'You get to the cathedral by eleven, I promise we'll be there.'

Chapter 25.

Now Gaddis had to gamble.

Was there a chance that Russian intelligence might have linked him to Calvin? Was he next in the line of fire? If Moscow had been listening to Somers's telephone calls, bugging his office at the Mount Vernon or a.n.a.lysing his email traffic, then the answer was almost certainly 'yes'. If his own Internet activity had been under any kind of scrutiny, either by the FSB or GCHQ, the myriad searches he had performed for information about Edward Crane would almost certainly have been flagged up and reacted upon.

There was less reason to believe that British or Russian intelligence could have tied him to Charlotte's investigation. True, they had discussed the Cambridge book at supper in Hampstead, but they had not spoken about it on the telephone nor exchanged any emails after that night. It was the same with Ludmilla Tretiak: Gaddis had been careful to leave no email or telephone footprint prior to his visit. Unless the FSB had deliberately lured him to Moscow in order to track his movements, his meeting with Tretiak should have pa.s.sed unnoticed.

Other factors seemed to be working in his favour. Somers had been killed more than two weeks earlier. Charlotte had been dead for over a month. If the Russians were going to come for him, they would surely have come already. As long as he remained vigilant, as long as he avoided making any further references to Crane or ATTILA on his computers or phones, he would surely be safe. But was it dumb to go home? Christ, was Min in danger in Barcelona? That thought, more than the threat to his own safety, left Gaddis with a feeling of complete powerlessness. Yet what could he do? If they wanted to get to Min or Natasha, they could do so at a moment's notice. If they wanted to silence him, they could strike at any time. It would make no difference if he moved into a hotel, slept at Holly's apartment, or emigrated to Karachi. Sooner or later, the FSB would track him down. Besides, he didn't want to be driven out of his home by a bunch of gangsters; that was cowardice, pure and simple. He would rather stay and confront them; to give in was another kind of suicide. He would never be able to go back to his old life while the men who had killed Charlotte and Somers were still at large. What would Min make of him if he did that? What would she think of a father who had run?

Several hours pa.s.sed before Gaddis allowed himself to think that he was perhaps overreacting. There was, after all, every possibility that Charlotte had died of natural causes. As for Somers, people were knifed in London all the time. Who was to say that Calvin hadn't just been the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time? True, the coincidence of their sudden deaths, so recent and so close together, was unsettling, but Gaddis had no proof of foul play beyond a hunch that the Russian government was b.u.mping off anybody a.s.sociated with ATTILA.

What happened next restored his faith still further. While booking a flight to Berlin at an Internet cafe on Uxbridge Road, Gaddis saw, to his consternation, that Ludmilla Tretiak had made contact on the email address which he had given to her in Moscow.

The message had gone into his Spam folder, perhaps because it was written in Russian.

Dear Dr GaddisI am sending you this message from a friend's computer using her email address so I hope that it will not be discovered. I enjoyed talking to you when we met. I feel that I must thank you for bringing to my attention new information concerning my husband's death.I am in a position now to be able to help you further. You may already know that the MI6 Head of Station in Berlin while my husband was working in East Germany was Robert Wilkinson. Fyodor also knew him by the alias Dominic Ulvert. I do not know what use you will be able to make of this information, if any. But you asked me who else in Berlin might have known Mr Edward Crane and it seems likely to me that this man would have been in contact with the most senior officer from British Intelligence working in Berlin at that time.This is all that I can think of at present which may be of a.s.sistance to you. But I could see in Moscow how dedicated you were to solving this mystery and your enthusiasm touched me.

It could have been a trap, of course, an attempt by the FSB to lure him into a meeting with a non-existent former SIS officer. Yet the slightly breathless, dreamy tone of the email sounded like Tretiak, and offered hope that she remained unharmed.

He looked again at the screen. Finding a loose sc.r.a.p of paper in his trouser pocket, Gaddis scribbled down the names 'Robert Wilkinson' and 'Dominic Ulvert' and tried to remember if he had seen them before, either in Charlotte's files or in the boxes which Holly had given to him. He couldn't recall. He knew that there was a risk in trusting Tretiak and that his natural optimism was both a strength and a weakness at times like this, but there was no way he could ignore what she had told him. The information was crying out to be investigated. At the very least, he could ask Josephine Warner to run the names through the Foreign Office archives. Where was the harm in that?

Gaddis rang her an hour later from a payphone on Uxbridge Road.

'Josephine?'

'Sam! I was just thinking about you.'

'Good thoughts, I hope,' he said. 'How are things down at Kew?'

They briefly exchanged pleasantries but Gaddis wasn't in the mood for small talk. He was keen to secure Josephine's help in tracking down the information.

'Do you think you could do me a favour?'

'Of course.'

'Next time you're at work, could you see if there's anything in the records about a Foreign Office diplomat named Robert Wilkinson? If that doesn't work, try Dominic Ulvert. Anything you can get on them at all. Letters, minutes from meetings in which they were involved, conferences they may have attended. Anything.'

It was only the second time that they had spoken since their dinner in Brackenbury Village and Gaddis was aware that his manner was direct and businesslike. It surprised him when Josephine suggested getting together a second time.

'I can have a look,' she replied. 'In fact, why don't we have another supper? This one on me. I can bring copies of any doc.u.ments I find.'

'That would be incredibly kind.'

And suddenly Gaddis's memories were no longer of Josephine's strange, withdrawn behaviour on the Goldhawk Road, but of her face across the candlelit table at dinner, promising something with her eyes.

'I'm afraid I'm busy this weekend,' she said. 'Next week would be easier if you're around.'

'Why? What are you doing this weekend?'

'Well, thanks to you, I finally got my act together.'

'Thanks to me me?'

'You made me feel so guilty about not visiting my sister, I invited myself to stay. I'm leaving for Berlin tomorrow.'

He reflected on the serendipity of the coincidence. 'That's extraordinary. I just booked a flight to Berlin this afternoon. We'll be there at the same time.'

'You're kidding kidding?' Josephine sounded genuinely excited at the prospect; perhaps her 'complicated' boyfriend had not been invited along for the trip. 'Then let's meet up. Let's do something at the weekend.'

'I'd love that.'

Gaddis told her where he would be staying 'a Novotel near the Tiergarten' and they made a tentative plan to have dinner on Sat.u.r.day evening.

He couldn't believe his luck.

Chapter 26.

Forty minutes earlier, Tanya Acocella had been pa.s.sed a note informing her that Dr Sam Gaddis now known by the cryptonym POLARBEAR because, as Brennan had observed, 'he'll soon be extinct' had visited an Internet cafe on the Uxbridge Road and purchased an easyJet flight to Berlin. He was due to leave London Luton at 8.35 on Friday morning, returning two days later. The fare had been charged to Gaddis's Mastercard and he had booked two nights at a Novotel at Tiergarten as part of a package deal with the airline. Tanya had wondered why Gaddis was using a public computer, rather than the PC at his house in Shepherd's Bush, and concluded that he was at last becoming aware of the surveillance threats posed by his interest in ATTILA.

As the sun was coming down on what had been a crystal-clear day in London, she called Sir John Brennan.

'Do the names Robert Wilkinson and Dominic Ulvert mean anything to you in the context of ATTILA?'

Brennan had just come off the Vauxhall Cross squash court and was boiling with sweat. He asked Tanya to repeat the names and, when she did, swore so loudly that his voice could be heard by a cleaning lady in the women's changing rooms.

'Where the f.u.c.k is Gaddis getting his information?' he snapped. 'Meet me in the courtyard. Half an hour.'

While Brennan showered and changed back into a grey suit, Tanya ran a trace on Wilkinson and Ulvert, encountering the same wall of obstruction and restricted access which had characterized her earlier searches for Crane and Neame. Somebody, somewhere, was trying to prevent her from doing her job. It was the first thing that she mentioned to Brennan in the courtyard. He had closed the access door back into the building so that they were alone in an area normally populated by smokers. n.o.body would disturb the Chief in such a situation.

'Forgive me for saying this, sir, but I believe there are some things you haven't told me about ATTILA.'

Brennan peered down at Tanya's legs. He had pulled a muscle in his arm playing squash.

'Perhaps there are things you aren't telling me me,' he replied, turning around. He didn't feel that it was appropriate for Acocella to be criticizing his methods. 'Last time we spoke, you told me that Gaddis was investigating Harold-b.l.o.o.d.y-Wilson. Now, for some reason, he's stumbled on Robert Wilkinson.'

'As you said, sir, AGINCOURT was a wild-goose chase.'

'Fair enough, fair enough.' Brennan's mood now changed abruptly. He had known, as he put on his suit, that he would have to come clean about certain aspects of the ATTILA cover-up. Tanya could hardly be expected to perform effectively with one hand tied behind her back. 'I should perhaps have been more candid from the start.'

Tanya was surprised that Brennan should capitulate so readily.

'Bob Wilkinson was Head of Station in Berlin when the Wall came down. He'd been operating in East Germany for the best part of a decade. Ulvert was one of his pseudonyms. In 1992, the FSB tried to a.s.sa.s.sinate him in London. The attempt failed, but he consequently emigrated to New Zealand, to get as far away from his old life as possible.'

'Why did the FSB want him dead?'

'Because of his relationship with ATTILA.' Tanya searched Brennan's face as she listened, still sensing that he was holding something back. 'The Russians were embarra.s.sed that they had been duped for so long, so they set about b.u.mping off anybody who had been a.s.sociated with Crane.'

'Anybody? Doesn't that const.i.tute quite a large number of people? Crane was operational for almost fifty years.'

Brennan took her point but could not, for reasons which he hoped she would never be aware, express himself more candidly.