The Trinity Six (31 page)

‘All in a good cause.’ She surprised him by kissing him gently on the cheek. ‘Most of it, anyway.’ She turned and walked up the stairs. ‘Sleep well. Will you turn off the lights before you go to bed?’

‘Of course. I’ll be five minutes.’

Gaddis found the whisky in the kitchen and poured himself four fingers. Switching on the television, he surfed briefly for a twenty-four-hour news channel which might be covering developments in the Wilkinson shooting. But CNN was fixed on an American political story, Sky News broadcasting a business programme. He turned the television off, checked the bolt on the front door and made his way upstairs.

He could hear a shower running when he reached the landing. There was a line of light under Tanya’s bedroom door. He thought of the pleasure, the blessed release of spending the night with her, but walked resignedly in the other direction, down the corridor towards Jeremy’s study. Sure enough, Tanya had laid out the towel and the T-shirt, as well as a packet of aspirin, a bottle of mineral water and an alarm clock to put beside his bed. Gaddis showered and changed into the T-shirt, briefly flicked through a copy of the
Spectator
and was asleep before midnight.

* * *

He woke at eight to find that Tanya had already left for work. There was a note on the kitchen table reiterating her demand that Gaddis remain in the house. ‘If you have to smoke,’ she said, ‘keep doing it in the garden.’ He scrunched the note into a ball and threw it into a bin, noticing a spare set of house keys hanging on a nearby hook. He pocketed them, fixed some cereal and a percolator of coffee, read the second half of the
Spectator
and smoked a cigarette through an open window. At about nine o’clock he had another shower, changed into a shirt which Tanya had hung for him on the landing – ‘another one of Jeremy’s’, the note had said – and wondered how he was going to kill the next ten hours under effective house arrest. He was not nosey by nature and had no interest in going through Tanya’s private possessions; his own encounter with a permanent blanket of MI6 surveil-lance had made him more, not less respectful of other people’s privacy. He flicked through a couple of photo albums, which were lying on a table in the sitting room, but learned only that Tanya and Jeremy had been on holiday together in Paris and Egypt and that Jeremy wore Speedos – without apparent irony – whenever he came within striking distance of a body of water.

By ten o’clock, Gaddis was bored out of his mind. He washed his clothes using the machine in the kitchen and hung them up on a line in the garden. By eleven he had resorted to watching daytime TV, settling on an old black-and-white thriller starring Jimmy Cagney. Was this his future? Whenever he stopped to think about what Brennan and Tanya were cooking up for him, he could only conclude that he would soon be sucked into the same witness protection programme which had claimed Edward Crane. It was no kind of life. It was too depressing even to contemplate. Such an existence would shut him off irreversibly from Min, from his work at UCL, from the entire structure of his life. He
had
to contact Holly. Finding the tape was his only route to freedom.

At half-past two, he found a Tesco spaghetti bolognese and some salad in the fridge. It was only as he was mopping up the sauce with a slice of stale brown bread that he remembered the package which had been posted through his door in Shepherd’s Bush. He retrieved the carrier bag from the sitting room and sat on the sofa with a kitchen knife, slicing through the seals on the envelope.

He did not recognize the handwriting on the front of the package. He assumed it was a book of some kind, a document sent by a colleague.

But it was not.

There were photographs inside. Seven of them. Gaddis pulled them out, along with a note which had been typed, unsigned, on a folded sheet of A4 paper.

He turned the photographs over and felt his soul twist like a corkscrew.

There were seven pictures of Min.

Min at the beach. Min with a friend. Min with Natasha. Min outside her school.

Gaddis stood up and ran to the door.

Chapter 52

Gaddis found a phone box fifty metres from the Cromwell Road, the roar of six lanes of traffic funnelling into the booth as he picked up the receiver. He scrabbled in his pockets for change and had to turn the contents out into his hands as he searched for a twenty-pence piece. He had only pound coins, pushing one of them into the slot and accidentally dropping three others on to the floor of the booth as he did so.

The money clunked through, but did not register on the read-out. Gaddis swore and tried a second time, losing another pound in the same way. He dialled 155 for the international operator and was put through to a woman with a thick Liverpudlian accent.

‘I need to make a reverse charge call to Spain.’

‘Certainly, sir. What number please?’

He knew Natasha’s landline by heart and, within a few seconds, could hear the phone ringing out in Barcelona.
Be at home
, he whispered.
Be at home
.

‘
Hola?
’

It was Nick, the boyfriend. The operator explained that a man was calling ‘collect’ from London and would Nick accept the charge?

‘Sure.’ They were connected. ‘Sam?’

‘Yes. Is Min there?’

‘What?’

‘I said is Min there?’

Nick wasn’t taking too kindly to Gaddis’s tone. He had accepted the charges, after all. He deserved a bit of respect for his generosity, some appreciation, a little small talk. ‘You want to talk to Min?’

‘Yes, Min. My daughter. Is she there?’

‘She’s at school, Sam. You sound flustered. Is everything all right, mate?’

Gaddis didn’t want to be called ‘mate’ by anybody at a time like this, least of all by Natasha’s feckless, underfunded boyfriend.

‘No, nothing is all right. Where’s Natasha?’

‘I think she’s at work.’

‘What do you mean, you “think”?’

‘Tell you what, mate. Why don’t you call her there? Sounds like this is a conversation you should be having in private.’

‘I don’t have her num—’

To Gaddis’s disbelief, Nick hung up. He swore at the phone, so loudly that two passers-by on the street turned and looked at him with a look of fear in their eyes. Slamming down the receiver, Gaddis gathered up the loose change from the floor and realized that he could not remember the name of the company that Natasha worked for in Barcelona. All of his numbers were stored on a mobile phone still lying, battery-dead, under a filing cabinet in her apartment. He could not even recall the name of Min’s school. It was a Catalan word, some regional anomaly that he had always found impossible to remember. How was he going to find out if she was OK?

He stopped. He tried to regain his composure.
No news is good news
, he told himself. If Min had been harmed, Nick would know about it. Besides, the note had been a warning. All he had to do was drop the Crane story, forget about Platov and Dresden, and all his problems would be over.

He opened the door of the phone booth. Cars were being held at lights on the Cromwell Road. It was cold and Gaddis zipped up his coat against the wind. He lit a cigarette and smoked it while pacing the street, back and forth, like a prisoner in a yard. He could conclude only one thing: that he would never be free of the FSB. The note was meaningless in this context, the hundred grand just a lure. As long as he was alive, he posed a threat to Sergei Platov. If he agreed to the blackmail, it would only postpone his demise – in a car crash, from a gas leak, from a little polonium-210 in his California roll. He walked back to the phone. The only way of securing Min’s future was to get his hands on the tape. That would at least give him some leverage, something priceless with which he could negotiate her safety.

This time the phone accepted the pound coins. He dialled Holly’s number. Her voice as she picked up was like his last chance of salvation.

‘It’s me,’ he said.

‘Sam? Where have you been?’ She was more perplexed than irritated. ‘I’ve been trying your mobile for days. Where are you?’

‘I had to stay in Barcelona longer than I thought. My mobile got stolen.’ What choice did he have but to lie to her? ‘Just got back to London. I haven’t got round to replacing it.’

‘We were meant to go for dinner.’

Christ. Quo Vadis on Saturday night. He had completely forgotten making the plan; it had just been a smokescreen for Tanya and GCHQ. He apologized and waited for Holly to say something, but she remained silent. Did she know that he was lying to her? Did she know what had happened to Wilkinson?

‘I need you to do me a favour,’ he said.

It was far from the best approach. He owed Holly an explanation for his behaviour. Now, without bothering to ask how she had been, without even being honest about Wilkinson, he was expecting her to do his bidding in an emergency, the details of which he could not reveal to her. He was thinking only of Min’s security. Whatever it would take to keep her safe, Gaddis would do it, even if that meant manipulating Holly.

‘You want me to do
you
a favour?’

‘I know it’s a lot to ask.’

‘You haven’t even asked it yet.’

He was grateful that he had found her in a reasonable mood. ‘It’s about your mum’s files. Are you sure you gave me everything? The other day you said there might be other boxes in the basement.’

‘There are,’ she replied plainly. It sounded as though she was being distracted by something in the room from which she was talking.

‘Are you at the flat now?’

‘No. An audition.’

‘Could you go down there as soon as it’s finished? Would you be able to do that?’

‘Probably.’ Again, Holly sounded distracted. Gaddis experienced a strange desire for her to succeed at the audition, to be given a part that she could sink her teeth into, something that would take her away from him. She didn’t deserve to have been dragged into all this. He wanted her to be safe and yet, at the same time, he needed her to save Min. ‘Why don’t you come over and we can both do it?’ she said.

It was as though she was testing him. ‘I can’t get away.’ Gaddis looked out at the Cromwell Road and knew that he was no more than ten minutes by cab from Tite Street. But if he went there, it would surely draw FSB surveillance towards the tape. ‘I’m right in the middle of this MI6 thing. The book.’

‘About Bob?’

‘About Bob, yes.’ The lies were paper-thin. ‘If you could just go down there and have one more look, particularly for any tapes or cassettes that your mum might have mislaid.’

‘Tapes or cassettes?’

A woman in a raincoat appeared outside the phone box, waiting to make a call. Gaddis opened the door ajar and said: ‘I’m going to be a long time, I’m sorry,’ in a low voice. Holly was saying: ‘Sam?’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you all right? I’m worried about you.’

His body was bound in sweat. He had realized, even as he was talking, that he would never be able to publish the Crane biography, that there was now no hope of Platov’s defection becoming public knowledge. The president would remain in power and there would be dozens more Charlotte Bergs, dozens more Katarina Tikhonovs, who would lose their lives simply to prop him up in power. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘There’s just a deadline on the manuscript. I can’t get away. I can’t come to meet you.’

‘What if I find the tape?’

‘Then you must bring it to me.’

‘Where? In Shepherd’s Bush?’

‘No.’ That wasn’t safe. Holly would be observed and the tape stolen. He had to think of an alternative location. UCL was undoubtedly being watched. ‘Take it to the Donmar Warehouse and leave it with Piers.’

‘With
Piers
? Why?’

How could he explain that one? It made no sense. Gaddis cobbled together another shabby lie.

‘I’m working around the corner in a UCL building.’

‘Then why don’t I just bring it to you there?’

‘Security’s a pain in the arse. They’ll either lose it or tell you they’ve never heard of me.’ He was amazed by the speed of his lies. ‘The Donmar is less than a quarter of a mile away. I go there for coffee all the time. You can leave it at the ticket desk. Just call me at this number if you think you’ve found anything.’

He gave the landline number of Tanya’s house, wondering if even that was a safe means of communicating with her.

‘What number is that?’

‘UCL.’

Gaddis was sick of deceiving her, sick of the effort of accumulating excuses. He tried to change the subject.

‘What’s the audition for?’

‘A play.’

But he did not listen to the answer. Instead, focused only on the tape, he said, ‘Will you have a chance to look for it today?’ and finally Holly’s patience ran out.

‘Sam, I’ve told you: I’ll look for the fucking tape. But it might help your cause a bit if you stopped acting like a paranoid schizophrenic and explained to me what the fuck is going on. Try asking a girl out for dinner. Try asking how I’ve been. It’s not difficult. Last time I checked, we were having a pretty good time together. Now every time I speak to you I feel like your fucking secretary.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ He wanted nothing more than to be alone with her, back in his old life, Min safe in Spain, students coming to his office at UCL. But it had all been ripped away from him.

‘It’s OK. I just hope you’re being honest with me.’ She paused before adding: ‘If there’s somebody else—’

Gaddis looked out at the passing traffic and shook his head. ‘I promise you it’s not that. It’s about my daught—’ He almost choked on the word, lost in the wretchedness of his situation.

‘Sam?’

‘Please don’t worry. Just find the tape, OK? Just try to find it. You have no idea how important it could be.’

Chapter 53

Gaddis went back to the mews house and locked the door. There was a laptop in Jeremy’s room and he found the name of Min’s nursery on Google. He called the number, using Tanya’s landline. To his relief, the headmistress reassured him, in broken English, that Min was ‘completely fine’ and would be going home ‘as usual, in a few minutes’. Gaddis hung up, lit a cigarette and went out into the garden. The small, enclosed space was overlooked by more than a dozen windows in five or six separate buildings, but he was certain that here, at least, he was safe from FSB eyes.

He took the crumpled note out of his pocket and looked at it again.

Something about it didn’t ring true. If the Russians knew his home address, they would have killed him. Why bother with a crude blackmail? The FSB wanted anybody with any connection to Dresden out of the picture – Platov wasn’t interested in buying Gaddis’s silence. His political career, his reputation, his hold on power, was worth far more to him than £100,000. Besides, Tanya had insisted that the FSB knew nothing about Gaddis’s search for Edward Crane. So how come they knew about Barcelona? How come they could identify Natasha and Min? Only SIS had access to that information. The note could only have come from Brennan.

Back inside, he stared at the phone, willing Holly to ring, but knew that he would have to wait. Her audition would continue until five or six, she might then have dinner with friends and would not get home until late. It wasn’t even certain that she would bother looking for the tape once she did.

Gaddis knew that he had panicked in the aftermath of seeing the photographs. He realized that he had been a coward. He was entrusting his fate, and that of his daughter, to Holly, who could lose her life if she was caught in possession of the Platov evidence. He had to go to Tite Street himself. He would have to talk his way into Holly’s building and then somehow break into the basement.

He found a toolbox under the sink in Tanya’s kitchen. Inside it, there was a small steel saw, some screwdrivers and a hammer. He took them and put them in a plastic bag with no clear idea in his mind what he intended to do with them. He tried to compose himself, wondering if he was even making the right decision by leaving the safe house. But surely, in final analysis, he had no choice? He locked the house, went out on to Earls Court Road and waved down a cab.

In the taxi, he formed the basis of a plan. The storage cupboard was located in the basement of Holly’s building behind a door which was secured by padlock. Gaddis would use the metal saw to cut through the bolt. The basement could be accessed via an exterior staircase leading down from the street. Gaddis would need only to walk down this short flight of steps, to break the glass on the door and then to open it from the inside.

But he had never broken into a building in his life. He had seen private eyes picking locks on a thousand television shows, watched crime prevention advertisements in which hooded thieves entered properties via conveniently flimsy windows, but there was no reason to believe that he would be able to break in simply by smashing some glass and reaching for a door handle. After all, this was a basement in the heart of Chelsea – burglar country. At the very least, Holly’s residents’ association would have put steel bars on every door and window in the building.

Gaddis told the driver to pull up on Royal Hospital Road, fifty metres from the corner of Tite Street. He had concluded that his best tactic would be to behave as naturally as possible. From the point of view of a surveillance officer, there was nothing at all unusual in a man visiting his girlfriend at her flat.

A light was on in the first-floor window of Holly’s building. By a quick calculation, Gaddis worked out that the flat number was either 5 or 6; Holly was one storey higher in 7, with 8 on the opposite landing. He walked up the steps and pushed the buzzer for Flat 6.

No answer. He waited fifteen seconds, then pressed it again. Nothing. He tried the buzzer for 5. This time the owner answered almost immediately.

‘Yes?’

It was an elderly woman. Gaddis hoped that she knew Holly.

‘Delivery. Flowers for a Miss Levette.’

‘Holly? You want number seven,’ came the reply. ‘Nobody’s sent me flowers for years.’

‘There’s no answer on seven, I’m afraid, luv.’ Gaddis had switched his accent to delivery Cockney. ‘Any chance you could let me in?’

‘Well, I don’t—’

The door clicked open. He could not hear what the old lady had said. Had she triggered the lock or had somebody in Flat 6 eventually come to the intercom and buzzed him inside?

He called out ‘Thanks’ and stepped into the foyer. There was a staircase ahead of him and he immediately walked down towards the basement. There were two flats at the bottom of the stairs, on either side of a small landing. To reach the storage area, Gaddis had to go through a fire door, walk a few metres along a short corridor and then turn right into a narrow passage. He pushed a timer light and saw ten storage cupboards, one for each flat, on either side of the passage. There was a heavy padlock on ‘7’ and he took out the saw.

It was utterly quiet: no sound of a television or radio, no muffled conversations, no child crying out or laughing. He began to cut the bolt. The noise of this was so obtrusive that Gaddis was certain he would be overheard. The saw slipped on the metal; he wasn’t able to angle the blade so that it could grip on the bolt. He tried sawing with his left hand but that was also hopeless. He turned around and lifted the padlock as far from the door as it would allow, almost slicing through his index finger as he attacked it from the opposite side. He moved the blade more slowly this time, but still it slipped. He swore and then the timer light gave out. Gaddis released the padlock, walked back down the passage and pushed the switch. He reckoned he had no more than a minute before it would black-out again. This time, though, the saw made a narrow incision in the bolt; the blade warped repeatedly, but at least it was cutting.

He began to saw, steadily and methodically. The noise was still embarrassingly loud: anybody who overheard what he was doing would surely immediately conclude that he was cutting through a lock. The light gave out a second time. Gaddis switched it on again and, within a few seconds of returning, finally cut through the bolt. He opened the storage-cupboard door, found a light switch and cast his eyes over the piles of boxes, books, bin liners and hangers of dry cleaning left by Katya Levette. He would have to go through each box, one by one, until he found what he was looking for. He was convinced that he would find the tape, but it was the conviction of a man who has nothing left in which to believe.

He started at the back first, on the basis that most of the files Holly had given to him had come from the front section of the cupboard. He made a small space for himself and ducked down to floor level, reaching for the boxes. It occurred to him, in the sweat of the cramped space, that Holly could come home at any moment, walk down to the basement and find him busily going through her mother’s private possessions with a sawn-off padlock at his feet. How was he going to explain that one?

A small box tucked in the far corner caught his eye. It had the name of a New Zealand wine maker printed along the side. Gaddis opened up the flaps and saw a stack of hardback books and manila envelopes stashed inside. He pulled out the books and held them open to the ground so that anything concealed inside them would drop out. Nothing did so, except a bookmark from a shop in Dunedin. He went for the envelopes instead. Gaddis had the vivid sensation that if he did not find the tape in the next thirty seconds, he would never find it at all.

A clear plastic folder. A DVD. Not a tape, not a cassette, but a DVD. Written in marker pen on the front of the disk were the words ‘P INTERVIEW 88 I’. Gaddis felt a rush of excitement, almost as if his skin was humming, but it was checked by the realization that this was not the master tape. Wilkinson must have made a copy on to DVD and kept the original in New Zealand. Or did MI6 have the master tape in a vault at Vauxhall Cross? At the same time, he experienced a profound fear that he was about to be disturbed. Had he come so close to his prize only to have it snatched away at the last minute? He had heard no sound in the basement, no voices on the stairs, only the noise of the occasional car or ped estrian passing on Tite Street. But he knew that he would have to move fast. He put the DVD into the inside pocket of his coat, switched off the store-room light, closed the door and looped the broken padlock over the handle to give an impression of security. Then he turned, walked back down the passage and opened the fire door leading back towards the stairs.

Holly was coming towards him, carrying a set of keys and a bag from Marks & Spencer.

‘
Sam
? What are you doing here?’

‘No time to explain,’ he said, grabbing her arm and spinning her back up the stairs. ‘You have a DVD player in your flat, don’t you? We need to sit down and watch some TV.’