The Trinity Six Part 28

'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 Sat.u.r.day 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 you a favour?' 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 bas.e.m.e.nt.'

'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 t.i.te 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 ca.s.settes that your mum might have mislaid.'

'Tapes or ca.s.settes?'

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 ma.n.u.script. 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 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 a.r.s.e. 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 acc.u.mulating 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 f.u.c.king tape. But it might help your cause a bit if you stopped acting like a paranoid schizophrenic and explained to me what the f.u.c.k 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 f.u.c.king 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 pa.s.sing 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 rea.s.sured 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 s.p.a.ce 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.

THE SUM OF ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS WILL BE PAID INTO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT. THIS BUYS MORE THAN YOUR SILENCE.

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 t.i.te Street himself. He would have to talk his way into Holly's building and then somehow break into the bas.e.m.e.nt.

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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 bas.e.m.e.nt of Holly's building behind a door which was secured by padlock. Gaddis would use the metal saw to cut through the bolt. The bas.e.m.e.nt 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 gla.s.s 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 smas.h.i.+ng some gla.s.s and reaching for a door handle. After all, this was a bas.e.m.e.nt in the heart of Chelsea burglar country. At the very least, Holly's residents' a.s.sociation 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 t.i.te 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. 'n.o.body's sent me flowers for years.'

'There's no answer on seven, I'm afraid, luv.' Gaddis had switched his accent to delivery c.o.c.kney. '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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 pa.s.sage. He pushed a timer light and saw ten storage cupboards, one for each flat, on either side of the pa.s.sage. 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 m.u.f.fled 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 pa.s.sage 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 embarra.s.singly 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 s.p.a.ce for himself and ducked down to floor level, reaching for the boxes. It occurred to him, in the sweat of the cramped s.p.a.ce, that Holly could come home at any moment, walk down to the bas.e.m.e.nt 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 ca.s.sette, 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed away at the last minute? He had heard no sound in the bas.e.m.e.nt, no voices on the stairs, only the noise of the occasional car or ped estrian pa.s.sing on t.i.te 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 pa.s.sage 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.'

Chapter 54.

Fifteen minutes earlier, Alexander Grek had pulled his blue, C-Cla.s.s Mercedes into a vacant parking s.p.a.ce on the corner of t.i.te Street and Royal Hospital Road and made a call on his mobile phone. Karl Stieleke had picked up and informed Grek that he was less than a quarter of a mile away, walking down King's Road half a block behind Holly Levette. She was on her way back from an audition and had just gone into Marks & Spencer. Stieleke antic.i.p.ated that she would be home within ten or fifteen minutes.

Three days earlier, the two men had broken into Holly's apartment and conducted a two-hour search for any trace of the doc.u.ments that had purportedly been sent to her late mother, Katya, by Robert Wilkinson. Grek had been acting on instructions from Maxim Kepitsa, who had himself been tipped off about the relations.h.i.+p between Wilkinson and Levette by Sir John Brennan. Grek and Stieleke had looked on every shelf, in every drawer, under every carpet and inside every cupboard of the apartment, but had found no sign of any material relating to Sergei Platov or the KGB. They had subsequently put a tap on Holly's T-Mobile account and overheard a fraught telephone call from 'Sam', logged that afternoon at 1521 hours and traced to a phone box near Cromwell Road.

'Sam' had made reference to a 'tape or ca.s.sette' apparently stored in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Holly's building. It was the one place that Grek had not thought to look. He would now wait for Holly to search the bas.e.m.e.nt and to obtain the tape, then follow her to the Donmar Warehouse. This would lead him to 'Sam', who was the final link in the chain. Grek suspected that Sam would turn out to be the same man who had shot Nicolai Doronin in Berlin. An eyewitness in Vienna had provided a description of 'an Englishman in his early forties' who had been sitting with Robert Wilkinson at the Kleines Cafe. Grek suspected that this was also 'Sam'. Once he had been eliminated, Grek a.s.sumed that Kepitsa would consider the ATTILA case closed. He was not aware that Gaddis had entered Holly's building less than an hour earlier.

Looking up, he saw Holly coming down t.i.te Street carrying a shopping bag full of M & S groceries. Stieleke was on the opposite side of the road, following her at a distance of about forty metres. Grek watched as Holly took out a set of house keys and walked into the lobby of the building. Stieleke moved past her, walked up to the Mercedes, opened the pa.s.senger door and stepped inside.

'Will she get the tape?' he asked.

'She will get the tape.'

Chapter 55.

'Any chance of explaining to me what's going on?'

Holly was trailing Gaddis as they walked up the stairs to her apartment. Two steps below the third-floor landing he suddenly pulled her towards him and moved his head against hers so that he could whisper into her ear without risk of being overheard.

'Listen to me,' he said. She was trying to wrestle free of him but he held her body tight against his own. 'Don't say anything. Don't talk when we get into the flat. Go across the room, draw all the curtains like it's a normal evening and switch on the radio. Put it on as loudly as possible without p.i.s.sing off your neighbours. The disk I found in your bas.e.m.e.nt is a recording of Sergei Platov attempting to defect to the West in 1988. It was filmed by Bob Wilkinson. Bob is dead. He was a.s.sa.s.sinated in Vienna. Your apartment may be under observation by MI6 and the Russian FSB. I am so sorry. Do not say anything anything when I let go of you.' when I let go of you.'

She pushed away from him, her eyes flooded by tears. 'Bob?' she mouthed and he suddenly saw an older woman's face in Holly's, the face of her mother, the face of Katya Levette. He pressed a finger against his mouth, shaking his head, imploring her not to speak. He looked across the landing at the door of her flat. He nodded to her, encouraging her to take out her keys and to open the door. Holly did so and crossed the room, switching on the radio as Gaddis had asked and drawing the curtains. Gaddis double-locked the door behind them, went to the television and saw the DVD player on the ground. There was a newspaper discarded on the sofa. He took a pen out of his jacket pocket and wrote on a corner of the front page: Do you have any blank DVDs? Do you have any blank DVDs?

Holly's head was tilted to one side, as if evaluating Gaddis anew. He realized, sooner or later, that they would have to speak, so he whispered to her, not knowing who was listening or what, if anything, they could hear.

'The disks you use to make your showreels,' he said. 'I need to make copies of this disk.'

She nodded. 'Sure. I have loads.'

Her eyes were heavy and he said: 'Don't worry,' reaching out and holding her hand. 'Everything's going to be fine.'

'I'm not worried,' Holly said, and pulled her arm away.

Gaddis took the disk out of the plastic folder and inserted it into the DVD. Within a few seconds, he saw what he had dreamed of seeing. Sitting on a wooden chair in a well-lit German suburban living room was the young Sergei Platov. It was unmistakably the same man: Gaddis had seen dozens of photographs of the Russian president in his youth while researching Tsars Tsars. Platov was wearing a white s.h.i.+rt, a striped tie and his full lips glowed under the unforgiving glare of a bright overhead light. His carefully combed hair was parted on the left-hand side and he appeared calm and relaxed. There was a small gla.s.s of water in front of him. Gaddis heard a voice on the tape.