The Trinity Six (23 page)

Chapter 36

It was a half-truth, at best, but Gaddis reasoned that he owed Tanya Acocella a lie or two. Barcelona was just his way of getting even.

He had spent the morning out at Colindale, on the outskirts of north-west London, going through back issues of
The Times
. He could have searched for what he was looking for online, but what was the point of risking the Internet when there were hard copies going back as far as the eye could see? The issue he found was dated 6 January. Gaddis laid a private bet with himself that Catherine Wilkinson had accepted her fiancé’s proposal on New Year’s Eve, shortly before the corks had flown on the midnight champagne.

That gave him the surname for the wedding party, which was the first step of his plan.

The second step was to ascertain the date of the wedding and to find the hotel in Vienna where the bulk of the guests would be staying. To that end, Gaddis printed out a list of all of the four- and five-star hotels in Vienna and called them, one by one, from two phone boxes at Colindale station, making the same request.

‘Hello. I’d like to book a room for the weekend of the Drechsel–Wilkinson wedding. I’ve been advised that you are offering a special rate for guests of the couple.’

The first fourteen hotels had ‘no record at all of a wedding booked under that name’, but the fifteenth – the SAS Radisson on Schubertring – knew all about it and asked Gaddis for his surname.

‘It’s Peters,’ he said. ‘P-E-T-E-R-S. Peters.’

‘Yes, Mr Peters. And when would you like to arrive?’

Gaddis now moved to the next phase of his strategy. He needed a precise date for the wedding, so he said: ‘Could you tell me if any of the other guests are arriving on the Thursday evening? Would that be too early, do you think?’

‘Thursday the twenty-third, sir? Let me see.’

Then it was just a question of whether the ceremony would take place on the afternoon of Friday twenty-fourth or Saturday twenty-fifth.

‘Mr Peters?’

‘Yes.’

‘It is difficult to say, sir. We have a number of guests arriving on Thursday evening, but the majority appear to be checking in on Friday.’

So, the reception would be on Saturday twenty-fifth. ‘I see,’ he said.

Gaddis had played along for a few moments more, requesting a double room for the Friday and Saturday nights, but when it came to divulging his full name and address, he had pretended that he had ‘an important call coming through on another line’ and promised the receptionist that he would complete the booking online.

‘Of course, Mr Peters. Of course. We very much look forward to seeing you in Vienna.’

Chapter 37

Two days later, Gaddis left London for Spain, catching an evening flight from Heathrow to Barcelona. He experienced no difficulties at passport control, but assumed that SIS would have Natasha’s apartment under tight surveillance. His plan was straightforward: to spend a few days in Spain with Min and then to go to Austria by train. Under the terms of the Schengen Agreement, it was possible to travel all the way to Vienna without displaying a passport; Gaddis assumed that this would make the task of tracking him considerably more complicated. He planned to arrive at the Radisson on the evening of Friday twenty-fourth, in time to mingle with the other guests. He would pretend to be a friend of the Drechsel family, discover the location of the wedding reception and perhaps accompany some of his new-found friends to the service the following day. That would bring him into direct contact with Robert Wilkinson.

As it transpired, SIS were short on manpower and had to task the observation of POLARBEAR in Barcelona to two local officials based at the British Consulate-General on Avenida Diagonal. Their surveillance reports, sent direct to Sir John Brennan in London, recorded a staggeringly mundane series of visits to local playgrounds, branches of VIPS restaurant, shivering swims in the October waters of Icaria Beach and father-and-daughter strolls along the Ramblas. Brennan was shown photographs of Min piggy-backing on her father’s shoulders, emerging from a cinema carrying an ice cream, and laughing as Gaddis told her a story on the Metro. There was evidence that POLARBEAR had been involved in a heated exchange with his ex-wife over tapas at a restaurant named Celler de la Ribera, but this was put down to the commonplace anxiety of a messy divorce. In every respect, POLARBEAR appeared to have abandoned any interest in pursuing Crane and Wilkinson.

Gaddis, of course, had done his bit to convince the boys and girls at GCHQ that he was a reformed character. He sent a Facebook message to Charlotte’s husband, Paul, for example, telling him that he had ‘not been able to make any headway at all’ with Charlotte’s book and had therefore decided to ‘set it to one side, at least for the time being’. He made deliberate decoy appointments by email, arranging to see a PhD student at UCL on the morning of Friday twenty-fourth. Using his regular mobile phone, he had also called Holly in London, telling her how much he missed her and inviting her to dinner at Quo Vadis on the night of Saturday twenty-fifth.

Brennan knew there was a possibility that POLARBEAR was laying an elaborate trap which would be sprung in Vienna, but he was more immediately concerned by the report Christopher Brooke had filed describing his encounter with Robert Wilkinson. Two passages, in particular, had alarmed him to the point of fury:

Brennan felt that he had no choice; he had surely exhausted every other available option. Picking up the phone, he instructed his secretary to put him through to Maxim Kepitsa, Second Secretary at the Embassy of the Russian Federation and one of three declared FSB officers operating in London.

The call went through to Kepitsa’s private line.

‘Maxim? It’s John Brennan.’

‘Sir John! How delightful to hear from you.’

‘I wondered if you fancied joining me for a quiet lunch? Wanted to have a word with you about a man your government has been looking for since ’92. One of ours, in fact. Fellow by the name of Ulvert . . .’

Chapter 38

It took Gaddis almost two days to travel from Barcelona to Vienna. The first leg of the journey involved catching an overnight sleeper to Fribourg in Switzerland. He then made a short commuter connection to Zurich before catching a third, nine-hour train across the north face of the Alps. On the first night, in a bunk which he could ill afford, he had slept as deeply as he had done for many weeks; on the final leg of the journey, he had read
Archangel
from cover-to-cover, surviving on processed cheese sandwiches from the dining car and cups of increasingly vile black coffee. Every hour or so, he would move position on the train in an effort to ascertain whether or not he was being followed; on the rare occasions that the train stopped, he would shoulder his overnight bag, step down on to the platform, make his way towards the ticket inspectors, then climb back on board at the last minute.

As far as he was aware, his departure from Spain had gone unnoticed. He had taken three hours to get to the Estacio Sants in Barcelona, leaving Natasha’s apartment at dusk and taking a series of taxis, trains and buses in eccentric loops in the hope of shaking off any watchers. At the same time, he had left his regular mobile, fully charged and set to ‘Silent’, hidden underneath a filing cabinet in the sitting room of Natasha’s flat. He hoped that the signal given off by the phone would give the impression to GCHQ that he was still in Barcelona. He had then bought a new mobile at a Corte Inglés department store and placed the Tottenham Court Road SIM into the slot at the back.

If he was honest with himself, there had been something tawdry in all this, a sense of betraying Min by visiting her in Spain and then involving her, however indirectly, in the grisly business of deception. She was five now, still captivatingly innocent, yet when he had played with her on the swings near Natasha’s apartment or held her tiny hand in the flickering gloom of a deserted matinée cinema, he had felt the awful conflicting stain of his ambition, a sense that his determination to avenge Charlotte and to solve the riddle of Dresden was more powerful even than the security and wellbeing of his own child. Was that the case? Was he so stubborn, so desperate to succeed, that he would rob Min of her own father? That was the reality: he was putting his life at risk by pursuing Wilkinson. There was no other way of spinning it. And yet, he was surely too far in to stop now. Sooner or later, the Russians would work out his links to ATTILA. He would almost certainly be killed for what he already knew. On that basis, there was no point in obeying Tanya’s instructions.

Of course, he still had his doubts. There had been a moment on the sands at Icaria, for example, when Min had emerged from the freezing sea and Gaddis had held her thin, shaking body in a giant beach towel, thinking that there was nothing more important in the world than his precious, growing, giggling daughter. The times they would spend together in the future, however infrequent, would be infinitely more rewarding than any book about Edward Crane. But money intruded on everything. That same night, he had argued with Natasha over dinner at Celler de la Ribera, insisting that he was down to ‘thin air’ financially, only to hear her accuse him of ‘making false promises about Min’s future’ and ‘abandoning your daughter to the prospect of a third-rate Catalan education’.

So it was money, in the short term, which had convinced him to continue. Without funds to support Min, he was failing in his duty as a father. When he hid the mobile phone under the filing cabinet, for example, Gaddis had rationalized the act as a necessary subterfuge; he simply couldn’t write the book with SIS on his tail. Just a few minutes earlier, he had tucked Min up in bed and kissed her goodbye. He had then gone into the kitchen, shaken the feckless Nick by the hand, kissed a dry cheek proffered by Natasha and gone outside to hail a taxi.

There was an irony in the timing. If he had stayed just fifteen minutes longer, Gaddis might have seen the incoming call from ‘Josephine Warner’ in London. As it was, Tanya left a message on his voicemail:

It was a touching message, as candid as it was risky to her career. Yet there was a further piece of information of which even Tanya Acocella was not aware.

That afternoon, disembarking from a BA flight out of Heathrow, a high-ranking Russian diplomat with suspected links to the FSB had calmly strolled through Vienna International Airport in the company of a Mr Karl Stieleke who, according to MI5, was a known associate of Nicolai Doronin. The diplomat’s name had flashed up as soon as he had presented his credentials to the authorities. Alexander Grek was in Austria.

Chapter 39

Gaddis’s train pulled into Vienna’s Westbahnhof a little after eight o’clock on the evening of Friday twenty-fourth, so it was nine by the time he had checked into the Goldene Spinne Hotel on Linke Bahngasse, a two-star in the centre of the city manned by a jovial receptionist in late middle age who appeared to be the only member of staff on the premises. Gaddis registered under his own name and was obliged to hand over his passport, but it was with a sense of relief that he saw the manager making a record of his personal details by hand, rather than storing them on a computer.

He had chosen the hotel because it was functional, cheap and anonymous. His spartan room on the top floor resembled a daytime cabin on a cross-Channel ferry: crisp white sheets were pulled taut across a narrow, hard-mattressed bed; there was a small tiled bathroom with a sink and shower; a kettle with sachets of tea and instant coffee; a view of a cobwebbed airshaft.

He was travelling light, but had a linen suit rolled up in his overnight bag and a pair of leather shoes for the wedding. He took out the suit, requested an iron from reception, then hung it on a coat-hanger behind the door. He showered and shaved, a blessed release after the cramp and sweat of his long journey, changed into a fresh cotton shirt and found a restaurant two blocks away where he wolfed a pepperoni pizza and half a carafe of red wine. It had gone eleven by the time he had paid the bill and set out for the Radisson.

Gaddis knew how overseas weddings worked. The guests usually knocked off work in the UK at around lunchtime on Friday, caught a budget flight to the host country in the late afternoon, inevitably bumped into some of their old school and university friends at one of the restaurants recommended by the happy couple in the literature posted out with the wedding invitation, sampled a couple of local dives, then headed back to their hotel to drink into the small hours at the residents’ bar. As Gaddis walked through the automatic doors of the Radisson, beneath the EU flags and the wrought-iron lampposts on Schubertring, he could hear the confident bellows of British laughter emanating from a room adjacent to the lobby. Somebody was shouting out: ‘Gus! Gus! Do you want ice with that?’ and there was a piano tinkling in the distance.

The bar was smaller than Gaddis had expected. He counted perhaps twenty guests seated at half a dozen wooden tables dotted around the room and a further twenty standing in the spaces between them, armed with schooners of lager, glasses of wine and tumblers of Scotch and brandy. There were photographs on the walls of famous guests who had stayed at the hotel: Gaddis picked out signed shots of Bonnie Tyler, Silvio Berlusconi and the African-American actor from
Miami Vice
who was either Crockett or Tubbs; he could never remember. At the bar, a thirtysomething Brit wielding his room key in lieu of payment recognized Gaddis as a fellow traveller and struck up conversation.

‘You one of us?’ he said. ‘The wedding?’

‘I’m one of you,’ Gaddis replied. ‘Just checked in.’

‘Phil,’ said the Brit, proffering a damp, though iron-strong handshake. ‘Friend of Catherine’s?’

‘Of Matthias. Have you seen him around tonight?’

It was the one major flaw in his strategy; if either Catherine or Matthias showed up, Gaddis would have to head back to the Goldene Spinne and find another way of gaining access to the wedding. Thankfully, Phil put his mind at ease.

‘Nah. Big family dinner over at the Sacher. Doubt we’ll see him. His lot are all staying over there.’

‘Catherine’s family as well?’ He was trying to ascertain whether or not there was a chance of bumping into Wilkinson.

‘Far as I know. What are you drinking, mate?’

Moments later, Gaddis had an eighteen-euro balloon of cognac in his hand and was being led to a table near the door which was occupied by Phil’s wife, Annie, his ‘oldest mate’, Dan, two women on a narrow, upholstered sofa whose names he didn’t quite catch, and a pink furry elephant with its trunk lodged inside a table lamp.

‘The wife won it at the Prater!’ Phil exclaimed. ‘Know it? Massive amusement park.’

Gaddis knew the Prater. ‘Congratulations,’ he said, smiling. Annie looked as though she had escaped from three small children for the first time in five years; there was a disconnectedness about her and shadows of sleepless nights around her eyes. ‘Coconut shy?’ he asked her. ‘Tombola?’

‘Shooting.’ She shouldered an imaginary gun, aimed it at Phil, and Gaddis knew that he had lucked on the right crowd; this lot were pissed and easygoing. They would tell him where the wedding was being held, what time the service began, probably how many sugars Catherine Wilkinson took in her tea.

‘Sam’s an old friend of Matthias,’ Phil announced, placing a hand on the small of Gaddis’s back and gesturing him into a non-existent space beside the two women.

‘You are?’ said one of them, budging along the sofa. ‘Tell us more. What’s he like? None of us has ever met him.’

‘I’ve met him,’ said Annie quietly. ‘He’s lovely.’

Thanks to the magic of Google, Gaddis had done his research on Matthias Drechsel. Catherine’s fiancé was thirty-six, worked in shipping (specifically ‘the chartering of gas carriers’) and, according to his online company profile, had taken a graduate diploma in business administration from the International University in Vienna.

‘To be honest, I haven’t seen him for years,’ he began. ‘I was quite surprised to be invited.’

‘How do you know him?’ Dan asked. It didn’t look as though he was particularly interested in the answer.

Gaddis embarked on the lie. ‘I taught very briefly at the International University here. Matthias was a student of mine before he switched to business administration.’

‘Conscientious was he?’ asked the second woman. She was flushed with alcohol and wearing a scarlet skirt which had risen up above the knee.

‘Extremely,’ Gaddis told her, grinning.

After that, it was plain sailing. He laughed at Phil’s jokes, told a couple of his own, asked interested questions about Catherine’s past and bought several rounds of drinks. By one o’clock, he was firm friends with all of them, not least the lady in the scarlet skirt who had taken what his late mother would have described as ‘a bit of a fancy’ to him.

‘I hope we’re sitting next to each other tomorrow,’ she said, just as Gaddis was trying to bring an end to the conversation they were having about her brother’s ‘nightmare’ girlfriend. ‘You’re really lovely to talk to. You really know how to listen, Sam.’

‘Kath!’ Annie exclaimed. ‘You have to forgive her, Sam. She doesn’t know how to behave herself when she gets a few drinks inside her.’

‘I don’t even know where the reception is,’ Gaddis replied, seizing an opportunity to discover the last piece of information he needed before heading back to his hotel. ‘I left all my bumph back in London.’

‘Next door,’ said Phil, who was in the habit of overhearing other people’s conversations. He pointed behind him, in the vague direction of Schubertring. ‘Big building across the street. “Kursalon” or something. In the Stadtpark.’

‘And the service is at, what, two o’clock?’

‘Three, mate. Three.’