The Trinity Six (26 page)

Chapter 44

Gaddis replaced the receiver. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. He was standing on a deserted street in a city that he did not know, wanted by the Austrian police, pursued by the Russian secret service, at the mercy of a British spy who had consistently lied to him about her identity. This is what his life had come to. He felt as if he had been on the run for months. He tried to remember what he had been doing at the exact same time the previous year and realized that he had been in Spain, in a seaside village about an hour north of Barcelona, trying to teach Min how to swim. He managed to smile briefly at the comparison but the memory did little to calm his frazzled nerves.

What to do now? Walking away from the phone booth, cutting down a side street, Gaddis tried to will within himself a determination not to fail. There was no time to feel sorry for himself, no time to panic. This was now a game of survival, a challenge which he had to face. Arriving at this conclusion did not feel like a particularly courageous act; it was simply that he had no choice.

It began to rain. A cab hissed by and Gaddis hailed it, instructing the driver to take him to the International Centre on the north side of the Danube. It was the address he should have given on his first journey, a landmark building in Vienna which was home to both the United Nations and to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The journey would take at least fifteen minutes and give him time to assess his options in the back of a car, away from prying eyes. He knew that the Russians had pinpointed either himself or Wilkinson to the Kleines Café. He also knew that Wilkinson’s death had been pre-meditated. But why had the assassin spared his life? Had he waited for Gaddis to go to the bathroom, or intended to kill both men, only to find Wilkinson sitting alone at the table? There was no way of knowing.

The rain was falling harder now. The driver slowed on approach to a bridge, stopping briefly at a set of traffic lights before crossing the Danube at speed. To the east, in the near-distance, Gaddis could see moored river boats and, beyond those, the dimmed lights of the Prater amusement park. He wondered what Tanya would do with the information he had given her. Tell Brennan, who would surely instruct her to abandon Gaddis to his fate, or keep her word and find some way of getting him out of Vienna? He remembered the word she had used on the phone.
Exfiltration
. It was as if he was some Cold War political renegade, a dissident or
agent provocateur
who needed to be spirited across the border. How had it come to this? For a moment he wondered if Tanya was over-reacting and thought of instructing the driver to turn around and take him back to the Goldene Spinne. Why couldn’t he just pick up his passport, pack his bags and take the first flight out of Vienna? But, of course, that was crazy. Every move he now made, every decision he took, was fraught with risk.

The cab raced south-east along a two-lane highway and, within minutes, had pulled up outside the UN building, a scifi compound of fountains and concrete walkways, drenched in rain. Now the obvious question arose. What the hell was he going to do for the next couple of hours? Get out and walk around?

‘Is there a bar near here?’ he asked the driver. ‘A nightclub?’

It was the option which made most sense: to disappear into a crowded after-hours club, to find a secluded corner and to bide his time until 5 a.m. But the driver merely grunted and shrugged his shoulders. It wasn’t clear whether he had failed to understand the question or simply knew of nowhere suitable to suggest. Gaddis looked out of the window at the pouring rain, at the security guards in their strip-lit booths. He noticed a police car parked on the opposite side of the street, apparently unoccupied.

‘
Sprechen Sie Englisch
?’ he said, but again the driver merely grunted and shrugged. There was an odd kind of childishness in his behaviour. Gaddis tried again. ‘
Ich bin ein club finden
,’ he said, fudging the language and adding to his sense of embarrassment by miming a dance in the back seat. ‘Club? Dancing?
Ist ein bar
?’

‘
Hier? Nein
,’ the driver muttered, tapping the wheel. Gaddis felt foolish. The radio was on and he wondered if reports of Wilkinson’s murder would soon filter through to the local news. As Tanya had said, it was possible that the police had already assembled a vague description of the middle-aged man who was seen drinking with the victim, a tourist with dark brown hair, around six feet tall and wearing a dark jacket. Gaddis would be regarded as a suspect or, at best, an accomplice. He had vanished moments after the killing and conveniently abandoned the table just as the killer was approaching. He said: ‘Bar,’ again to the driver, this time with more urgency in his voice and the vehicle pulled away from the kerb.

‘
Danke
,’ Gaddis told him.

The cab turned through one hundred and eighty degrees, passing within a few metres of the police car. Suddenly, behind the rain-obscured windscreen, Gaddis saw a shadow move in the front seat. There was somebody inside the car. The headlights switched on and the police vehicle moved out into the road behind them. Gaddis felt a wretched sense of bad luck, sure in the knowledge that he would now be pulled over and questioned. How was he going to explain what he was doing at the UN at two forty-five in the morning? It was one of the most sensitive buildings in western Europe, watched round the clock by police and security. It was stupid to have told the driver to come here, sloppy thinking. Why hadn’t he just gone straight to a bar? Now a random Austrian cop, some pre-adolescent cadet twiddling his thumbs on the night shift, held it in his power to bring the entire Crane investigation to a halt.

‘You want nightclub?’ the driver asked, but Gaddis was too distracted by the police car to absorb what he had been asked.

‘What’s that?’

‘I say, you want nightclub?’

He was startled to hear broken English. ‘
Ja, ja
,’ he replied, feeling that they were suddenly allies lined up against the might of the Austrian police force. The cab re-joined the two-lane highway running perpendicular to the Danube, the policeman trailing them at a distance of no more than twenty metres. ‘
Nightclub güt
,’ Gaddis said. He looked through the back window, the wipers on the police vehicle slicing against the rain.

‘Problem?’ the driver asked.

Gaddis turned back to face him. ‘No, no problem.
Kein Problem
.’

Now the cop was alongside them, running parallel with the taxi. Gaddis could hear the fizz of tyres on the wet road. The driver’s face was obscured in the darkness, yet Gaddis was sure that he saw him turn briefly and look across into the cab. It was surely only a matter of time before a siren was switched on and the taxi gestured on to the hard shoulder.

But, to Gaddis’s intense relief, the police car suddenly pulled off into the distance, accelerating to top speed in the darkness. Within moments his own driver had made a turn back on to the bridge and the cab was soon depositing him outside a nightclub in the centre of Vienna. Gaddis had no idea what district he was in, nor what sort of club he had been taken to, but paid the driver forty euros nonetheless and thanked him for his trouble.

It turned out to be the perfect place to lie low. For the next two hours, he was able to sit at an anonymous corner table in a dimly lit basement bar which thudded with the sort of music he heard all the time at UCL and which he could never successfully identify. A waitress kept up a constant supply of nuts and Polish beer and he smoked with impunity because the ban was being flouted seemingly by every customer in the place. There were pretty girls on the dance floor and clean-cut men wearing chinos and ironed blue shirts trying their best to seduce them. They looked like the future CEOs of Saatchis and the World Bank. At one point, Gaddis was sure that he spotted two of the guests from the wedding, but they did not appear to recognize him and left soon after four o’clock.

Just after four-thirty, as the last of the customers were being thrown out, Gaddis attached himself to a group of students stumbling drunk into the morning. At the top of the stairs, he turned away from them and decided to walk for a few blocks in search of a secluded spot where he could wait until five. The rain had stopped and he began to look around for a cash machine, only to realize that any transaction he made would instantly give away his position to any interested party with a track on his credit cards. Some of the paranoia and anxiousness he had felt before entering the club now began to return. The sun had come up, bringing a low blue light to deserted streets still damp from the early-morning rain. Three times Gaddis looked at his watch, only to find the time creeping towards five o’clock with a maddening slowness. He felt that his body language, his entire demeanour as he walked, was a living clue to his guilt. Any passer-by would surely notice this strange foreigner, walking the streets to no discernible purpose, turning around too frequently, looking nervously down every alleyway and street. Gaddis was conscious of moving his hands incessantly in and out of his pockets, of touching his face and hair. He was finding it impossible to relax.

Eventually, pulling out the last of his cigarettes, he turned into a straggly park populated by dogs and restless pigeons and settled on a bench to smoke. He would get through the cigarette, then switch on the phone, waiting for Tanya’s instructions. He had no passport, no change of clothes, no means of contacting his friends or colleagues, other than by using a mobile phone which, when switched on, would give away his position like a fire lit suddenly in the darkness of a valley. The isolation was total.

He stubbed out the cigarette. The park was overlooked by a concrete flak tower smothered in incomprehensible graffiti. A relic of the Second World War. Gaddis took out the phone and switched it on. The simple act of pressing the power button felt like an admission of defeat, as if he was deliberately surrendering to the inevitability of his own capture. He listened to the innocent pings and melodies of the phone as it booted up and felt sure that, within moments, an army of jackbooted militia would come tearing down the street to arrest him. He stared at the phone’s tiny screen. He was at the mercy of a piece of technology smaller than his own hand. The system appeared to have locked on to a signal, with five full bars of reception. But nothing was happening. No text from Tanya. No missed call. Nothing.

A minute passed, two. Gaddis looked at his watch repeatedly. It was already almost five past five. How long could he afford to keep the phone switched on? He wondered if he had misunderstood Tanya’s instructions and booted up either an hour too early or an hour too late. Had she meant five o’clock Austrian time, or five o’clock in London? Across the park, a woman was stretching her back beside a set of children’s swings. Two hundred metres to her left, half-obscured by a screen of trees, two men appeared to be eating breakfast in the front seat of a car. Everybody now was a potential surveillance operative or paid assassin. Gaddis wondered if he would ever again be free of this constant paranoia.

The phone beeped. Gaddis plunged to it with a manic relief.

CUCKOO CLOCK. DIZZY MOUSE.

He spoke aloud to himself: ‘What?’ and looked again at the screen. It made no sense. Cuckoo clock? Dizzy mouse? What did Tanya mean? He had been expecting detailed instructions, the address of a safe house in Vienna, at the very least the timetable of trains leaving for Prague or Zurich. Not this. Not four apparently meaningless words in the small hours of the morning.

Cuckoo clock. His mind went to work. It was plainly a code. Tanya was trying to conceal her instructions from third parties who might be looking in. She could not afford to risk anybody knowing where MI6 were intending to meet him. That meant that she was speaking directly to Gaddis, using what she knew about him to create a private language which only he would understand. Dizzy Mouse. What did
that
mean? Was there more to come? He waited another thirty seconds for any further messages, but the mobile remained frustratingly inert. He knew that he had to switch it off and did so as he stood up off the bench, walking quickly out of the park.

Cuckoo clock. It was a reference to Switzerland. Was he supposed to head west, for the Alps? Or was the Cuckoo Clock a bar or café in Vienna? But Tanya wouldn’t be so literal. If such a bar existed, it would be the first place that anybody would think to wait for him.

Finally the answer came to him, as simple as taking a breath. She was referencing
The Third Man
. They had even talked about the film at dinner in London. Orson Welles at the Prater, delivering his famous speech to Joseph Cotten:

Gaddis grinned, admiring her conceit. She was paying homage to the most famous Viennese film of them all. She was telling Gaddis to go to the Ferris Wheel.

Chapter 45

But why Dizzy Mouse?

Gaddis rode the U1 subway, clean and plastic, north-east to Praterstern station. The last half of Tanya’s message made no sense to him. He tried blending the words and re-working them as an anagram, attempted to think of nicknames or word associations with ‘Dizzy’ and ‘Mouse’, but nothing materialized. He could only conclude that it was a phrase or codeword he would have at some point later in the morning.

It was quarter to six by the time the train pulled into the platform. Gaddis took an escalator up into a low-roofed indoor shopping mall, deserted in the air-conditioned chill of a Sunday morning. He passed a shuttered newsagent, a café serving a single customer, his every move tracked by banks of surveillance cameras. Walking outside through a set of automatic doors, he emerged into a wide pedestrianized square. Three hundred metres to the north-east was the Ferris Wheel, her red booths stilled above a line of chestnut trees, ancient radiating spokes almost invisible against the pale morning sky. He quickened his pace and crossed a main road which ran alongside the square, joining a path towards the Wheel. To his right was a broad, well-maintained park, dotted with picnic tables; to his left, a Shell garage surrounded by parked cars. A group of migrants were crouched at the base of a tree and they stared at Gaddis as he walked by. He passed a line of ice-cream booths and was soon walking beneath a low bridge which led into a deserted square lined with mock-Regency buildings. This was plainly the entrance of the amusement park, a mini-Disneyland overlooked by distant rollercoasters, death slides and dodgem circuits. Gaddis had only a few vagrants and cleaners for company as he walked towards the base of the Ferris Wheel, wondering if he had even come to the right place.

He saw immediately that he had, because no more than thirty metres away was a cut-out of a huge cartoon cat with bared teeth beneath a pair of gleaming yellow eyes. A child-size rollercoaster track was disappearing into its open mouth. Above the cat was a technicolor sign: ‘DIZZY MOUSE’.

‘Sam?’

Gaddis turned quickly to find a stocky, matronly woman in blue jeans and a cream sweater emerging from the shadows beneath the Ferris Wheel. Her hair was dyed black, her face pale and round. She extended a gloved hand which he shook, coming to terms with his surprise.

‘I’m Sam, yes.’ He was amazed that Tanya had worked so quickly, amazed that anybody should have found him in such a place.

‘I was sent by your friend. You knew her as Josephine Warner. This is something that she told me she regrets. Her real name is Tanya Acocella. Does that reassure you about my identity?’

‘Yes it does, yes it does.’ Gaddis looked up at the Wheel, half-expecting to see a crowd of smiling onlookers observing their conversation.

‘My name is Eva.’

‘Sam,’ Gaddis replied, pointlessly. He acknowledged his mistake with a smile. ‘Are you with the Embassy?’

She ignored the question. ‘I understand that I am to take you to Hungary.’

‘
Hungary
?’ Here, if he needed it, was final validation of the seriousness of his predicament.

‘I have a car nearby,’ she added, noting his surprise. Eva’s voice was clipped but heavily accented. Gaddis noticed her gaze shifting to various corners of the park. It was clear that she was concerned about surveillance and wanted to leave as quickly as possible. ‘Won’t you come with me please? The message that Tanya sent to you was not secure. It was not as complex as we would have preferred. Many of us have seen
The Third Man
, Doctor Gaddis.’

‘Of course.’

So he followed Eva, a half-step behind, feeling like a child in the company of a stranger whose decency he has no reason to doubt. They walked back beneath the low bridge and headed for the forecourt of the Shell garage. The migrants were still sitting under their tree, but did not look up this time as Gaddis passed them. Entering a small area for parked cars, he heard the double sonics of an infra-red lock and looked up to see the rear lights on a grey Volkswagen saloon blinking briefly. Eva opened the passenger door, walked around to the driver’s side and switched on the engine. The car smelled of Deep Heat and Gaddis turned to see a muddied football boot, a pair of shorts and some shin pads lying on the back seat. He assumed that they belonged to Eva’s son, but their appearance was as incongruous to him as it was surprising. Was she a soccer mum with a parallel life? Were people like Eva the footsoldiers of the secret world, ordinary men and women with families and jobs who just happened to moonlight as spies? He was fastening his seatbelt when she began to ask him a series of questions about his life in London.
Do you have children? What work do you do? Is London very expensive?
It was plainly a pre-arranged tactic designed to put him at ease. No mention was made of the Wilkinson killing, nor of the reasons for Gaddis’s flight from Vienna. Eva kept things very light, very ordered. They were already fifteen minutes outside the city before he was able to turn the conversation around and to get some answers.

‘So, you never told me. Do you work for the British Embassy?’

She smiled, in the way that one might smile at an impertinent stranger. She had been driving, he noticed, at precisely five kilometres beneath the Austrian speed limit. The last thing she needed was a traffic cop pulling them over.

‘Oh no. I am a schoolteacher.’ She turned and saw that Gaddis looked confused. ‘But I help your friends when the telephone call comes through. It is a good arrangement.’

It was one of the strangest remarks he had ever heard. How did such an ‘arrangement’ come about in the first place?

‘So you know what happened to me last night?’ he asked. ‘You know about the shooting?’

This time Eva did not smile. ‘The details of your situation are not my direct concern, Doctor Gaddis. My only job is to make sure that I deliver you safely to your destination. If, on the way, I can help to allay any concerns you might have, or to answer any questions, I am also happy to do this.’

Gaddis looked out of the window. The pale, flat countryside was sliding past like a dream. He craved a cigarette but remembered that he had finished his packet in the park.

‘So where are we going?’ he asked. The ashtray in the car was clean and there was no sign of any cigarettes. ‘What’s the plan?’

Eva took a satisfied intake of breath. The conversation was developing along lines that she had predicted.

‘It’s very simple.’ She overtook a lorry travelling slowly in the lane ahead of them. ‘I am taking you into Hungary where we will stop at Hegyeshalom station. There you will board the train to Budapest. I will return to Austria.’

‘You’re not coming with me?’

He felt embarrassed to have asked the question, to have sounded alarmed. It was as if he had revealed some evidence of cowardice.

‘I am afraid not.’

‘You don’t normally take people all the way?’

Eva raised a matronly eyebrow. ‘Every case is different.’ The response had a tone of censure. ‘Because of a prior arrangement, I need to be back in Vienna before lunchtime. These arrangements were made only in the last few hours. If I had been given more warning, I might have been able to accompany you to the Budapest airport. But it is often the way.’

‘So I just get on a train? How do I get home? Has Tanya planned that far ahead?’

He realized that he sounded rude, but he was tired and fractious. He should have been more grateful to this woman who, after all, had left her home in response to an emergency call in the small hours of the morning. She was putting her life at risk by helping him. But the shock of the night’s events was still vivid to him; he was allowing basic courtesies to slip.

‘Tanya has planned everything,’ Eva said. ‘You simply stay on the train until it terminates in Budapest Keleti. On the platform, you will walk and find a man sitting on a bench wearing a green jacket. He is the next link in your chain. His name is Miklós. He has a beard and will be drinking from a bottle of Vittel water. He has seen your photograph so he will recognize you, even if you do not recognize him. Miklós will then take you to the airport and see that you are flown safely back to London.’

‘That’s extraordinary.’ Gaddis marvelled at the speed at which Tanya had worked, the favours she had called in, the networks she had activated. ‘And if I’m stopped at any point? If the Russians are on to me?’

‘It is a good question.’ Eva conveyed how seriously she was taking it by slowing down slightly and rubbing the back of her neck. ‘I have to tell you that there is very little possibility you will be stopped or asked questions at any point in your journey. Austria is not a police state, Doctor Gaddis. Hungary is not a police state. I have been following the news reports of the incident at Kleines Café and no mention has been made of a man fitting your description. Nevertheless, it is possible that the police are buying time and that they have a closed-circuit image of you from the bar. Is this possible?’

‘I don’t know.’ Gaddis was suddenly concerned. It was the one angle that he hadn’t considered. He thought of the Goth at Meisner’s apartment and tried to remember if he had seen a camera bolted to the wall of the café. Surely the blanket surveillance of CCTV cameras in public spaces was a uniquely British disease? ‘I don’t think so.’

‘But a member of staff or a customer may have spoken to the police. Again, we cannot be sure. Now, there is no formal customs at the border because of Schengen. If, however, we are stopped by a guard for some reason, you are to say that you are my friend from England and that we are going to Budapest for a few days. You have been staying at my apartment in Vienna since Thursday.’ There was a slight pause. ‘If necessary, we will give the impression that my husband and your wife would rather not know about this.’

It was Eva who blushed, not Gaddis, and he was relieved to see this calm, resourceful woman succumbing to a momentary embarrassment. It brought them closer together.

‘Do I stick to my own name?’

‘At this stage, yes. A new identity has been prepared for you by Miklós. You will leave Hungary using a false passport.’

Gaddis felt so reassured by the arrangements that he allowed himself to close his eyes and to relax briefly as the car sped towards the border. He thought that he saw an army of wind turbines stretching from horizon to horizon but could not be sure if he had been dreaming. The next thing he knew, Eva was pulling into a Soviet-era railway station on the Hungarian side, having crossed the border without need of disturbing him. They were in Hegyeshalom.

‘Wait here, please,’ she said when she saw that he had woken up. By the clock on the dashboard of the car, it was just before nine o’clock in the morning.

‘What’s happening?’

‘I buy ticket.’

He was alone in the deserted car park. A starved cat was scratching around in a small pile of rubbish. Some blue plastic tarpaulins had been piled up next to an old truck which looked as though it hadn’t been driven since the Cold War. Gaddis felt that he had woken up in Russia: a world of crumbling, Communist-era apartment blocks, of railway carriages abandoned on weed-thick sidings, of tangles of loose wire in overhead cables. Everything less neat, everything less manicured. He caught the smell of his own breath and craved some water. Falling asleep had been a mistake. The brief respite had left him feeling more, not less tired.

Eva returned five minutes later armed with a cheese sandwich, a half-litre bottle of water and a ticket to Budapest.

‘You got a return,’ Gaddis pointed out, devouring the sandwich and drinking the water until it was almost finished.

‘You are coming back tomorrow,’ she replied, with a knowing smile. ‘A one-way journey always looks more suspicious. Which reminds me . . .’

She stepped out of the car and opened the boot, returning with a faded leather bag which contained some toiletries, a couple of paperback books and a T-shirt.

‘This is for your journey.’ She closed the door of the car. ‘A foreigner who gets on to a train without a bag may look suspicious. Try to find a seat next to a young person, if you do not wish to be disturbed. They are less likely to bother you with conversation. Within an hour you will be in Budapest. There is absolutely nothing to worry about. I am just sorry that I cannot come with you.’

‘It’s fine,’ Gaddis replied.

‘Could I have your mobile phone please?’ He was not surprised that she had asked. ‘I will take it back to Austria and switch it on in a park near my house. It may distract the people who are following you. They may believe that you are still in Vienna. On the other hand, they may assume that it is a trick. Either way, it is not safe for you to be carrying it. Do you have any further questions?’

There were hundreds more, of course, but Gaddis could not think of them. Probably better that way. There was no need to complicate things further. After all, how hard could it be? All he had to do was get on a train and meet a man called Miklós. He looked up to see the Budapest train sliding into the station. Eva had timed things perfectly. He stepped out of the car.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very kind. I don’t suppose we’ll get the chance to meet again.’

‘I don’t suppose,’ Eva replied. Gaddis gave her the phone and the battery. ‘You will be fine, Doctor Gaddis, you will be fine. I wish you the very best of luck.’