The Trinity Six (25 page)

Chapter 42

‘He
what
?’

Gaddis was dumbfounded. Of all the things he had been expecting to hear from Wilkinson, this was not it.

‘February of ’88. What we call a walk-in.’ Wilkinson was looking up at the blonde American. He obviously had an eye for a pretty girl. ‘Sergei Platov wanted to live in a nice big house in Surrey and he was prepared to give us whatever we wanted in order to get it.’

‘Christ. If that came out, he’d be finished. His political career would be in tatters.’

‘Precisely.’ It wasn’t as though Wilkinson was unaware of the implications. ‘The saviour of modern Russia – your latterday Peter the Great – exposed as a hypocrite who sold out his country in her hour of need and tried to flee to the West with a suitcase full of Russian secrets.’

‘And he came to you? You were the man he approached?’

Wilkinson nodded. It was plainly a source of considerable personal pride. The group of Americans who had been pressed up against the table had finished the last of their drinks and now began to file out of the café, the blonde going with them. Gaddis overheard one of them saying something about ‘finding a club that goes all night’.

‘I was in Berlin,’ Wilkinson continued. ‘A freezing bloody winter. Platov followed me into a cinema on Kantstrasse. There was a film playing to a half-empty house.
The Searchers
, if memory serves. I used to like going there in the evenings. My marriage had broken up. I was spending rather a lot of time on my own, you know?’ Gaddis nodded. He knew. He was at last able to reconcile the image of Wilkinson as a sensitive, romantic soul – the man revealed in the letter to Katya – with the brusque spook in front of him. ‘Suddenly, taking a seat right next to me, is a little man, taut and tough as a rat. Later, of course, we discovered that Comrade Platov was something of an expert in judo. I’d never seen him before. Too far down the food chain. But he hands me a piece of paper letting me know that he’s an officer in the KGB and wishes to defect to the West. I read it while he was sitting there, then looked straight at him and told him to fuck off.’

‘You what?’

‘I thought it was a bluff. One of their boring little games. But Sergei was insistent. “You must believe me, sir,” he says. “You must trust me.” “All right,” I said. “If you’re serious, meet me here again in twenty-four hours.” That gave me time to have him checked out, to get a car ready, a safe house wired for sight and sound.’

‘And did he show?’

‘Of course he showed.’ Wilkinson looked bewildered by Gaddis’s naïveté.

‘And you interviewed him?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the presence of John Brennan?’

A nod of appreciation. ‘Very good. In the presence of John Brennan, yes. Now see if you can riddle me this one. When asked to demonstrate that he was serious, guess whose name Platov gave us to prove his
bona fides
?’

‘ATTILA,’ Gaddis said, with a rush of exhilaration. The last piece of the puzzle had clicked into place.

‘Precisely. He betrayed Eddie to the Brits, blissfully unaware that ATTILA had been one of ours all along.’ Wilkinson leaned back in his chair. ‘That’s when I made my one and only mistake. I brought the interview to an end, implying that we needed more time to process the implications of Crane’s betrayal. I left Platov with the impression that we would be in touch – same time, same place, the cinema on Kantstrasse – and immediately arranged to have dinner with Eddie. Told him over a bowl of onion soup that some greedy KGB thug who fancied an easy life in the West had been prepared to give him up.’

‘And how did Eddie take that?’

It was the first time that Gaddis could remember referring to Crane as ‘Eddie’. He felt faintly ridiculous, like a schoolboy trying to be cool in front of one of the senior boys.

‘Not well,’ Wilkinson replied. He was shaking his head slowly, regretfully. ‘Eddie Crane was a complex animal who didn’t take too kindly to acts of betrayal. His entire life had been a delicate balancing act between East and West, a process of convincing highly intelligent people that he was somebody other than the person that he really was. I suppose, when you look at it, he had lived in fear of exposure for most of his life. Exposure during the war, exposure in the wake of Burgess and Maclean, and of course, exposure in the last, great phase of his career.’

Wilkinson stopped in mid-flow, perhaps to organize his thoughts. He soon picked up where he had left off.

‘Eddie, against his better judgement, decided to exact his revenge. Before we’d had a chance to properly evaluate Platov, to decide whether or not we wanted him to come across, Eddie went to see his KGB controller—’

Gaddis interrupted. ‘Fyodor Tretiak.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And told him that Platov was attempting to defect?’

Wilkinson nodded. It was as though they were now streaming the same information.

‘Tretiak, of course, was very low budget and
deserved
to have been posted to a backwater like Dresden. Rather than go to Moscow with this alarming piece of information, he confronted Platov in person and young Sergei managed to convince Tretiak that the whole thing had been a set-up. “I had no intention of defecting, Comrade Fyodor. This was a high-level influence operation on a British officer organized by Moscow Centre.” The whole thing was then forgotten. Tretiak didn’t report the matter to his superiors and Platov vanished. London, of course, was furious that Eddie had prevented us getting our hands on a KGB asset, but let him off on the grounds that he was a star. We weren’t to know that the whole Communist system was going to go tits up in less than two years anyway.’

Gaddis reached inside his jacket for a cigarette. Wilkinson saw the packet and winced.

‘Do you mind if you don’t? I know nobody in continental Europe obeys the bloody smoking ban except the law-abiding Brits, but if you feel like killing yourself, please feel free to do it out on the street.’

‘I’m fine,’ Gaddis said, replacing the packet. ‘Dozens of people in MI6 must know about this. How come it’s never leaked out?’

‘Not dozens.’ Wilkinson was scanning the review quotes on the back of the Yeltsin biography. ‘We’re not a country club. What you might call the “circle of trust” was actually very small. Apart from myself, Eddie and Brennan, the only other name in the loop was Colin McGougan, who was “C” until 1994. He’s dead now. Far as I know, nobody else had an inkling about Platov. He was small potatoes. The file was sealed and we went off in new directions.’

‘But you could finish Platov’s career at any point.’

Wilkinson reached across the table and held Gaddis’s forearm. It was like the passing of a secret from one generation to the next. ‘What do you think I’m doing now?’

‘You want
me
to destroy it?’

‘Precisely. I know how you feel about him. I’ve read your book.’

Gaddis knew that he was being flattered. ‘Fine. But I would also be avenging
you
.’

Wilkinson allowed himself a brief moment of reflection. ‘All right, yes. Platov tried to kill me, I demand some measure of vengeance. Is that childish? I handed Katya the scoop of her life and she drank it into the grave. Now I’m passing it to you.’

Gaddis had known for some time that the offer was coming. And now he had it. He had what he had been waiting for. He was the perfect conduit for the story, just as Charlotte had been the perfect vessel for Crane. And yet he felt cornered.

‘Look,’ Wilkinson picked his words carefully, ‘of course it’s not all about revenge. I believe that Platov is dangerous. I think he’s bad for Russia, I think he’s bad for Britain. The world, as they say, would be a very much better place without that monster in the Kremlin. So I’m asking you to tell the truth about the so-called saviour of modern Russia. I’m asking you to reveal that by 1992 Sergei Platov had been spotted by our good friend Mr Yeltsin’ – Wilkinson tapped the biography – ‘and had developed some serious political ambitions. He went full bore into politics and was fast-tracked to the very top. So, the last thing he needed was men such as Fyodor Tretiak, myself and Eddie Crane roaming the quiet countryside telling anybody who would listen that the risen star of Russian politics, the man anointed by Yeltsin, had tried to defect to the West during the death spasms of the Cold War.’

‘How does Brennan fit into all this?’ Gaddis asked.

‘Oh well, that’s a lovely sub-plot.’ Wilkinson almost laughed. ‘Platov hired some of his pals in organized crime to bump me off. I’d developed some fairly unsavoury contacts in St Petersburg over the years, and those same cronies were able to make it look as though I’d been on the take. It was ingenious, simple and effective. I give him credit for that. But Brennan, rather than listening to my pleas of innocence, believed the rumours and cut me loose. Unlike Eddie Crane, who got a brand-new identity and a slot in a nursing home, I was offered no protection, no assistance what soever from SIS. As far as the Office was concerned, I was a traitor to the cause.’

‘Hence New Zealand,’ said Gaddis.

Wilkinson nodded. ‘Hence the reason I live at the side of a hill, surrounded by sheep, looking over my shoulder, wondering when one of Sergei’s henchmen is going to come round the corner.’

‘And why has Brennan never been touched?’

Wilkinson shrugged. ‘Must have come to some sort of an arrangement with Platov.’

‘What kind of arrangement?’

‘Search me.’ Wilkinson looked genuinely baffled. ‘John was always very good at looking after his own interests.’

Gaddis shifted the direction of the conversation. ‘Do you have evidence of the meeting in the safe house? A recording of Platov attempting to defect? Is that the smoking gun, or did Brennan destroy everything?’

‘Not quite everything.’ Wilkinson was clearly pleased that Gaddis had arrived at the heart of the matter. ‘You said earlier that you had found nothing in the files.’

‘That’s right. Nothing. Nothing at all.’

Wilkinson looked at his hands. ‘What’s the lovely Eric Morecambe line? “You’re playing the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”?’

‘Something like that.’ Gaddis wondered what he was implying.

‘What’s your poison?’ Wilkinson asked abruptly. ‘High time I bought us a round of drinks.’

‘Can you wait two minutes while I go to the bathroom?’ Gaddis didn’t want to lose the table if Wilkinson went to the bar. ‘When I get back, you can put them in the right order.’

Chapter 43

There were two men inside the cramped bathroom, one washing his hands in a chipped sink, the other coming out of a narrow cubicle, adjusting his flies. Gaddis squeezed between the two of them, no eye contact, went into the cubicle and locked the door. There was an odd, crisp smell of mint on the air, as if his predecessor had sprayed breath freshener into the room out of consideration for his fellow man. Gaddis immediately pulled out the pen and notebook on which he had written the letter at the wedding and began to write quickly. He could not afford to forget any detail of what Wilkinson had told him and did not trust his fortysome-thing brain to reproduce a completely accurate account of their conversation in the morning.

The door of the bathroom opened and the two men left. Gaddis could hear the dull thump of what was now rock music in the café, muffled conversations beyond the door. He had no shorthand, but wrote at speed in an abbreviated script perfected over years of attending lectures: there were words, parts of words and coded abbreviations on the pages of his notebooks which made sense only to him.

The bathroom door opened again. Two men were talking to one another in German as they came in. Gaddis knew that he had only two or three minutes left in which to write his notes; after that, Wilkinson might lose patience and start to wonder why he was taking so long. He set down the details of Platov’s approach to Crane, closed the notebook and stood up.

At that moment, Karl Stieleke walked through the side entrance of the Kleines Café, removed a Beretta Px4 Storm and, in a single fluid movement, fired a silenced double-tap shot into the head of Robert Wilkinson, driving a fist of brain into the wall behind him. Stieleke, who was no more than four feet from the door of the café, did not pause to verify that Wilkinson was dead; he knew as much. Instead, he turned and pushed his way through the stunned crowd before anyone had time to react. He then sprinted north-east to a waiting vehicle and, within twenty seconds, was in the passenger seat of a Saab SUV, sitting alongside Alexander Grek and accelerating to seventy kilometres per hour along Singerstrasse.

Gaddis was putting the pen back in the inside pocket of his jacket when he sensed the commotion outside. At first, it sounded as if the music system had failed, the irritation of a song skipping repeatedly on a scratched CD, but then he heard a woman shouting ‘
Hilfe!
’ in a way that unnerved him. He opened the door and walked out of the bathroom into a scene of total panic; it was as if the café had tilted into another dimension. The music had stopped completely and crowds of drinkers were surging up out of the lower bar, pushing and tripping over themselves as they bottlenecked towards the main entrance on Franziskanerplatz. People were shouting, swearing. At first, Gaddis wondered if a fight had broken out, but this part of Vienna was surely too civilized, too orderly and conservative, for a couple of drunks to have begun trading blows. He tried to move against the tide of people and to get back to Wilkinson, but was caught in the energy of the panicking crowd and almost lifted off his feet as it carried him up a short, narrow flight of stairs towards the entrance. It was only then, in the first dim seconds of adjusting to the chaos around him, that Gaddis began to fear for Wilkinson. He said, in English, to a woman who was partly supporting herself on his shoulders: ‘What’s going on?’ but she ignored him, seemingly too shocked by what she had witnessed to explain why fifty or sixty people were suddenly hurrying out of Kleines Café into a deserted Viennese square at two o’clock in the morning.

Outside, almost immediately, Gaddis heard the word ‘gun’. It was spoken, very clearly and in English, by an American man whose face he could not see. He picked up further cubist snatches of conversation, phrases in both English and German which gradually assembled into the horrifying picture of what had happened. A man had been shot at point-blank range. An elderly man. Nobody had seen the gunman. Nobody had heard the gun.

Gaddis turned and tried to reach the booth, weaving through the dazed crowds. He was determined to get to Wilkinson. He was convinced that he was still alive. But there were too many people jammed into the narrow doorway and no means of getting past them. He recognized a woman who had been drinking near their table in the lower bar. She was holding a cigarette in her hand but seemed too dazed to remember to smoke it.

‘What happened?’ he asked her. There was no response. He said: ‘Problem?’ in German, and this time she reacted.

‘Somebody has been shot,’ she said, in English. ‘That is all I know.’ She reached for his arm, as if they were old friends and needed Gaddis to steady her.

‘A customer?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

It could only have been Wilkinson. Gaddis felt a dull charge of fear. His sense of dislocation was sudden and overwhelming. He was experiencing the same sense of bewildered shock that he had known in the apartment in Berlin and tried to void his mind of panic. Was he safe himself? He looked around the square and felt that at any moment he might be felled by a bullet. Simply by standing outside the café he was inviting a second shot. And what if he was recognized as the man who had been sitting with the victim? It was only a matter of time before somebody in the crowd pointed Gaddis out to the police.

In some obscure, still-functioning recess of his mind, he began to act decisively. A survival instinct kicked in. He noticed that people were running away from the bar, jogging into side streets, dragging their friends with them against a background of distant sirens. Gaddis followed, realizing that to get away from the scene of the attack was his best option. He turned south-east out of the square, moving swiftly downhill as part of a group of perhaps ten or twelve people. He passed between a shop selling English-language books and, on the opposite side of the street, what looked like a brothel or lap-dancing club. Ahead, Gaddis could see the traffic on Schubertring and the low trees of the Stadtpark. The street was no more than a few hundred metres from the Radisson and, for a moment, he toyed with the idea of going inside. But it was surely crazy to think that he could talk his way past a night porter who might later turn him over to the police.

He took out his mobile. He dialled Tanya’s number because there was nowhere else to turn. She picked up almost immediately, her voice groggy and disorientated.

‘Hello?’

He was convinced that she had betrayed him, yet there was a strange kind of reassurance in hearing her voice.

‘Why did you do it, Tanya?’

‘Sam?’

‘Bob Wilkinson has been shot.’

‘
Shot
? What?’ She sounded genuinely appalled, repeating what Gaddis had told her as if to absorb the full implications of what he was saying. ‘Where are you?’

A siren blasted in the near-distance, matched instantly by a second vehicle, tearing towards the Kleines Café.

‘Why did you do it?’ he asked her again. ‘Company orders?’

‘I don’t know why you think I had anything to do with this. Where are you? Tell me what’s going on.’

He could almost believe in her innocence. He wanted to believe in it. But there was no trust left between them. He said: ‘How am I supposed to know? I went to the bathroom, I left Wilkinson sitting at a table, next thing I know he’s been killed. You tell me what happened. You’re probably in fucking Vienna. You tell me how the hell they found out where he was.’

‘Sam. Listen to me.’ Tanya had composed herself. She was suddenly preternaturally calm. ‘This is what I was worried about. I thought you were still in Spain. What is this number you’re calling from? Is it a new mobile?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Hang up. Switch it off and take out the battery. Get at least a mile away from where you are, find a public phone and call me back. Do that.’

‘What?’

But she had already broken the connection. Gaddis spoke against the dead line, but Tanya was gone. He concealed himself in the recess of an apartment block entrance and stared at the screen. She was obviously worried that the Russians had a fix on his mobile. But was she genuinely trying to protect him, or just buying time in which to call John Brennan? Either way, he knew that he had no option other than to do as Tanya had instructed. He turned off the phone, his nail digging hard into the power switch, slid back the casing and removed the battery. He then placed the battery in his pocket, jogged down on to Schubertring and hailed a cab.

He fell into the back seat, unbalanced as a drunk, the driver staring at him in the rear-view mirror, waiting to be told where to go. Gaddis realized that he knew of no address, no destination in Vienna beyond the Goldene Spinne Hotel and the Ferris Wheel at the Prater. It was surely madness to go to the hotel and the Prater would be closed at this time of night. On an instinct, he blurted out ‘Hotel Sacher’ because it was the only other landmark in Vienna that he could think of. The driver made a noise at the base of his throat which was at once irritated and amused and within two short minutes Gaddis understood why: the Sacher was three blocks away. He could have walked there in under five minutes.

‘My mistake,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry,’ though there was no indication that the driver spoke any English. ‘I didn’t mean the Sacher. Can you take me to Südbahnhof?’

The driver now turned in his seat, a middle-aged man at the end of a long shift who didn’t much feel like being messed around by a drunk British tourist. ‘Südbahnhof?’ he said, as if Gaddis had asked him to drive to the moon. ‘No trains now.’

‘I’m meeting somebody,’ Gaddis replied and within an instant the driver had sighed and engaged first gear and swung out into the street, zipping through green lights towards the southern section of the city. They did not speak again. After a few minutes, Gaddis spotted a phone booth at the side of the road and instructed him to pull over.

‘
Halt, bitte
.’

‘This not station,’ the driver muttered.

‘I don’t care. Pull over.’

He paid him, a ten-euro note thrust through the window and no time to wait for the change. The pavement was covered in a puddle of thin mud which splashed against his shoes as he walked towards the payphone. There were no people in sight. The phone was covered in stickers, the box scratched by coins and knives. He dialled Tanya’s mobile.

‘Sam?’

‘I’m in a phone booth.’

‘Listen to me very carefully. We don’t have long. If your number was compromised, mine is too. It’s not safe for you out there. We’re going to get you out of Austria. Exfiltration. If they came for Wilkinson, they will come for you.’

Gaddis, stunned, did not respond. Tanya mistook his silence for scepticism.

‘Think about it. The police will almost certainly get a good description of whoever was sitting with Wilkinson tonight. They’ll be looking for you. You can’t go back to your hotel. That would be suicide. You can’t rent a car. You can’t go to a train station or out to the airport. The last thing we need is Sam Gaddis being taken into the custody of the Austrian police.’

He wondered why Tanya had started to refer to him in the third person. Is that how spooks operated? They turned you into a concept, an ‘asset’, anything to convince themselves that they weren’t dealing with a human being.

‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘the last thing Sam Gaddis wants right now is to be taken into the custody of the Austrian police.’

‘Good. Then listen. Do you still have your regular mobile phone?’

‘No. I left it in Barcelona. Everything else is back at my hotel.’

‘Don’t, whatever you do, go back there.’ He could see the logic in that request, but a stubborn part of his nature was still convinced that he had time to go back to the hotel, to pack his belongings and to leave Vienna. ‘It’s the first place they’ll wait,’ she said. ‘Do you have your passport?’

‘Tanya, everything is in my room. I came out tonight with a notebook, a pen, a packet of cigarettes. No, I don’t have my passport, I don’t even have my wallet. I’ve got about eighty euros in cash and a Tube pass. That’s it.’

A frustrated silence. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she replied eventually. ‘I need to clear this line. We need to stop talking. Get away from wherever you are and try to go somewhere safe. Find a basement. Find a bar or a nightclub. Go somewhere where you can disappear until five o’clock.’

‘What happens at five o’clock?’

‘What happens is that you’ll turn on your mobile for as long as it takes me to send you the instructions for your exfiltration. You have to trust me, Sam. Don’t go back to your hotel. We can arrange to have your stuff picked up. Go to another part of the city. Lie low for three hours. At five o’clock, I will send the instructions. As soon as you’ve received them, switch off your phone and do everything that I have told you. Understood?’

He was at once perplexed and yet humbled by her willingness to help him.

‘Understood.’