The Trinity Six (34 page)

‘Try me,’ Gaddis replied.

A teenage girl with what looked like a cold sore on her lip walked past them on the arm of her boyfriend. Gaddis saw that it was a lip-piercing and smiled to himself.

‘Something funny?’ Grek said.

At that moment, his mobile phone pulsed in the inside pocket of his coat. The Russian reached for it and both Gaddis and Tanya flinched, assuming that he was going for a gun. But he reassured her by unbuttoning the coat slowly and retrieving the phone with the tips of his fingers.

‘Relax. You assume that I would shoot you? What do you think of me?’

He looked down at the screen. It was a message from Kepitsa. Gaddis used the moment to glance across at Tanya, who reassured him with a nod. Grek looked up and spoke.

‘It would appear that you are right, Doctor Gaddis.’ In Russian, he added: ‘My instructions are to leave you in possession of the tape. I have your word that our business is concluded?’

‘You have my word,’ he replied.

Grek replaced the phone and turned in the direction of Chelsea Bridge, so that his back was facing them. He seemed to consider the possibility of a parting remark but thought better of it and walked away. Within moments he had disappeared into the glare of the London night. Almost immediately, Des materialized beside Tanya and said ‘Hi’ to Gaddis as though they were still in Berlin.

‘Get to the Mercedes,’ Tanya told him. ‘Go back and keep an eye on Holly. And find someone to take a look at that postbox.’

‘Don’t bother,’ Gaddis told her. ‘It’s a decoy. It’s a DVD of Holly’s showreel. I gave one of the real copies to a cleaning lady in the lobby. She told me she was going to post it to Princeton on her way home.’

Des acknowledged the trick with an admiring bob of the head and then crossed the Embankment, walking north up Tite Street. Gaddis leaned once more on the stone balustrade and saw an old wooden toy abandoned in the sands of the river, as if trapped by time.

‘What about Brennan?’ he said. ‘Does he know about the deal?’

‘Yes.’ Tanya was beside him, their arms almost touching. ‘The master tape is at Vauxhall Cross. I didn’t know that. It was the last of the many secrets he kept from me. Let’s just say that Brennan uses it for leverage whenever Platov gets ideas above his station.’

‘
Realpolitik
,’ Gaddis replied and watched a double-decker bus crossing the hump of the Albert Bridge. ‘What about Grek?’

Tanya took his hand with a barely disguised look of triumph on her face.

‘This will be his last night in our fair capital. Grek and Doronin will be called back to Moscow, their pal in the Mercedes as well. Brennan is also going to ask that Kepitsa be replaced.’

Gaddis wanted to congratulate her, but something was bothering him.

‘It doesn’t work, you know,’ he said, arriving at the words slowly.

‘What doesn’t work?’

A pleasure boat, packed with partygoers, was sliding on the current. ‘The Platov deal. What happens when he’s eventually turfed out of the Kremlin? What happens when he loses power? That’s when they’ll come for me.’

‘I doubt it.’ He was glad that there was conviction in her voice. ‘Platov is a tsar. You should know that. He’ll reign for as long as his health holds up. Why else did he change the constitution? Twenty years? Thirty? There’ll be no change in Moscow during that time. And afterwards, he’ll have his reputation to think about. He’ll know that the tape still has the potential to obliterate his political legacy. He wouldn’t be dumb enough to come after you.’

It was a comforting thesis and Gaddis was too worn out to argue against it. He reached into his coat and took out one of the disks. It was a final demonstration of his faith in Tanya Acocella.

‘I want you to keep one of these,’ he said. ‘Keep it safe.’

‘I will.’ She put the disk in her pocket but did not thank him for his act of trust. Instead, she produced a document of her own, a clipping from a daily newspaper. It was folded twice and slightly torn in one corner.

‘Did you see
The Times
?’

Gaddis shook his head. ‘Been a bit busy with one thing and another. House arrest until three o’clock this afternoon, then I had to run some errands.’

She smiled. ‘Take a look.’

Gaddis took the clipping and opened it up. It was a page from Saturday’s
Times
. There was a circle of red biro halfway down.

He passed it back to her.

‘Where have I seen that before?’

‘You don’t believe it?’

‘I don’t believe it.’

There was no more left to be said. It was time to go back to Holly. He wanted to telephone Natasha in Spain. He longed to speak to Min.

‘We’ll call you into the Office in a couple of days,’ Tanya said. ‘There’s the money to sort out.’

‘Ah yes, the money.’

He went towards her and they embraced. Tanya squeezed his chest, as if reluctant to let go.

‘Thank you,’ he said, kissing her on the cheek. Her skin was soft and cold. ‘For everything. Without you—’

‘Don’t mention it,’ she said, already turning to leave. ‘I’ll see you in a few days.’

Chapter 59

On the orders of Sir John Brennan, Thomas Neame had been moved from the Meredith nursing home on the outskirts of Winchester to a retirement village in the suburbs of Stoke-on-Trent. His name had been changed to Douglas Garside. He was denied Internet access and a mobile phone. He was largely confined to a two-bedroom house which he was obliged to share with a fifty-eight-year-old Scottish spinster named Kirsty who cooked his meals, washed his clothes and occasionally drove him to the local multiplex to watch whatever costume drama or arthouse hit had managed to force its way north from London.

Kirsty was ex-MI5. She had been told all about Peter, all about the trouble in Winchester, and had given Edward Crane so little wriggle room that, on at least two occasions, he had thrown her ‘filthy bloody food’ across the kitchen in a blizzard of crockery and threatened to ‘burn her in her bed’ if she didn’t stop ‘watching him like a hawk twenty-five hours a day’. Three times, he had rung Brennan direct (from a phone box near the local fish-and-chip shop) to complain that he was being treated ‘worse than a member of the ANC on Robben Island’. Crane entertained frequent dreams of making a break for Hull by taxi, where he knew that he could catch an overnight ferry to Rotterdam. It would have been a glorious homage to his old pal Guy Burgess, but SIS had left him with no passport, no money, and with no contact details for any of the agents – many of them long since dead – whom ATTILA had known during the Cold War.

‘You just cause too much trouble, Eddie,’ Brennan had explained. ‘We can’t afford to take the risk.’

It was a BBC documentary about the Taleban that had caught Crane’s eye. The modern fanatic, he learned, had resorted to Moscow Rules. Your average Islamist freedom fighter didn’t use a mobile phone, didn’t communicate by email. They were too easy to trace. Instead, he had adopted more old-fashioned means: the letter, the dead drop, the go-between. All of which gave Edward Crane an idea.

He had read several articles in the broadsheet press by a stalwart of Radio 4’s evening schedules whose views on everything from Sergei Platov to Salman Rushdie were taken as gospel by a spellbound and grateful British public. The broadcaster in question had written books, appeared on talk shows, even lectured at the Smithsonian.

Edward Crane decided to write him a letter.

Crane sealed the envelope, found a stamp in the kitchen, walked out into a damp Staffordshire morning and dropped the letter into a post box less than a hundred metres from his front door.

Kirsty didn’t see a thing.

Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks to Melissa, to my mother and father, and to Stanley and Iris. To Julia Wisdom, Rachel Rayner, Emad Akhtar, Anne O’Brien and all the team at HarperCollins. To Keith Kahla, Dori Weintraub and everybody at St Martin’s Press. To Tif Loehnis, Luke Janklow, Will Francis, Rebecca Folland, Kirsty Gordon, Claire Dippel and their colleagues at Janklow and Nesbit. To Emily Hayward and Tanya Tillett at the Rod Hall Agency. And to all the staff at
The Week
.

I am also very grateful to Melinda Hughes, Sam Loewenberg, Craig Arthur, Matthew Beaumont, Maxim Chernavin, Rory Carleton Paget, Annabel Byng, Tom Miller, James Owen, Guy Walters, Rupert Allason, James Holland, Alanna O’Connell, Giles Waterfield, Jonathan, Anna and Carolyn Hanbury, William and Mary Seymour, Grant Murray, Cal Flyn, Josie Jackson, Tom Cain, Sue and Stephen Lennane, Christian Spurrier, Annette Nielebock, Boris Starling, Nick Stone, Ali Karim, Michael Stotter, Nick, Bard, Chev and Viki Wilkinson.

The following books were very useful:
Their Trade is Treachery
by Chapman Pincher (New English Library, 1982);
The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5
by Professor Christopher Andrew (Allen Lane, 2009);
My Five Cambridge Friends
by Yuri Modin (Headline, 1995);
The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB’s Archives
by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev (HarperCollins, 1999);
Anthony Blunt: His Lives
by Miranda Carter (Pan, 2002). During his talk at Daunt Books, Sam Gaddis ought to have acknowledged the debt he owes to the scholarship of Peter Truscott.

C.C. London 2010

A note on ‘The Cambridge Five’

While studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and John Cairncross were recruited by Moscow Centre as agents of the Soviet NKVD. They became known as ‘The Cambridge Five’.

Burgess would go on to work for the BBC and for the Foreign Office. Maclean, the son of a prominent Liberal MP, also joined the Foreign Office and was First Secretary at the British Embassy in Washington DC between 1944 and 1948. Philby became an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service (better known as MI6). Blunt, a world authority on the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, worked for MI5 until 1945, at which point he was appointed Surveyor of the King’s Pictures (and, later, the Queen’s Pictures). During World War II, John Cairncross worked as an analyst at Bletchley Park. All five men passed vast numbers of classified documents to their handlers in the NKVD.

In May 1951, Burgess and Maclean boarded a ferry in Southampton, England, and defected to the Soviet Union. Their disappearance caused an international uproar. They had been tipped off by Blunt and Philby that MI5 were about to expose Maclean as a traitor. Four years later, Philby held a

press conference at which he denied being the so-called ‘Third Man’. He was exonerated in the House of Commons by the Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, and continued to provide information to SIS. Seven years later, while working as a journalist in Lebanon, Philby boarded a Soviet freighter in Beirut and was spirited back to Moscow. The trauma of his betrayal haunts British Intelligence to this day.

Cairncross was identified as a Soviet agent in 1952. However, his involvement in the Cambridge ring was covered up by the British government. In 1964, Blunt also signed a full confession, in return for immunity from prosecution. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher admitted to the House of Commons that Sir Anthony Blunt, one of the pillars of the British Establishment, had been a Soviet asset for more than thirty years. MI5 and SIS faced a further bout of bloodletting.

Guy Burgess died of alcoholism in Moscow in 1963. Maclean, who worked for the Soviet Foreign Ministry, died in 1983. In the same year, Blunt, who had been stripped of his knighthood, died at his home in London. Five years later, Kim Philby was granted a full state burial by the Soviet authorities. Cairncross, who had lived in Italy, Thailand and France, died in 1995, five years after the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky confirmed him as the ‘Fifth Man’.

The recruitment of the Cambridge Spies is regarded as the most successful ‘penetration’ by a foreign Intelligence service in the history of espionage. In Russia, the men from Trinity College were known simply as ‘The Magnificent Five’.

C.C. London 2010

By the same author

A Spy by Nature

The Hidden Man

The Spanish Game

Typhoon

Copyright © Charles Cumming 2011

Charles Cumming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-00-733779-8

EPub Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780007337811

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library