‘It’s just that you called him “Peter”. As if you were on first-name terms.’
Neame frowned, dismissing the theory with a slow shake of the head. ‘You’re mistaken.’
Was he? Always with Neame there was the feeling that he was holding something back, dissembling, protecting Crane from exposure. He wondered if they had worked together at SIS. ‘So where does that leave us?’
‘Us?’
‘I mean, how can I find out more about the Oxford Ring?’
‘Well, there’s very little about it in Eddie’s memoirs. I’ve told you all I can remember.’
The bluntness of this reply tested Gaddis’s goodwill.
‘Mind if I check that?’
Neame smiled. ‘Patience,’ he said, and Gaddis felt the irritation rise still further. It was so hard to be anything other than compliant and reasonable with a man of such advanced years, but he longed to be freed from the shackles of respect for the elderly.
‘Patient for what?’
‘I really have absolutely no idea about AGINCOURT. Eddie said he climbed fairly high in the Labour Party in the sixties and seventies. But that was all a long time ago.’
‘The Labour Party?’
Neame looked up. Beneath his eyes were patches of discoloured skin, years marked on the face as black stains. ‘Labour, yes.’
‘It’s just that you didn’t mention that in the cathedral.’
‘And?’
‘It’s helpful, that’s all.’
‘Well, he was hardly likely to be a Tory, was he? We’re talking about a working-class Yorkshireman, a Communist.’
Suddenly, some of the energy seemed to go out of Neame, like the fading grandeur of a once great house, and he was left looking breathless and tired. As if to confound this impression, he reached down to the floor and, with considerable effort, lifted a flimsy plastic carrier bag up on to the table.
‘I wanted to give you something,’ he said, stifling a cough.
‘Are you all right, Tom?’
‘I’m all right.’ Neame’s half-smile was almost paternal in its affection. Gaddis looked down at the bag and realized, with an excitement close to euphoria, what it contained.
‘Is that what I think it is?’
He was convinced it was the memoirs: there was something in the looseness of the plastic, the weightlessness of it as Neame had lifted the bag to the table. When he again glanced down, he could see the stapled corner of what looked like a manuscript. There was not much of it, just a few pages, but it was surely at least a part of the prize he craved.
‘Call this an act of faith,’ Neame said, encouraging Gaddis to open the bag. ‘It’s also evidence of my faltering memory. I’m afraid I have proved quite incapable of memorizing the details of ATTILA’s behaviour during the war.’
‘His behaviour during the war.’ Gaddis repeated the phrase without inflection, because he now had the stapled manuscript in his hands and was focused solely on what it contained. To his disappointment, he saw that it was merely three pages of hastily scrawled notes, written on fresh sheets of A4. The handwriting was identical to that on the notes which Peter had handed to him in Waterstone’s. In other words, Edward Crane hadn’t been anywhere near it. ‘What is this?’
‘A brief summary of what Eddie admits to having passed to the Soviets.’ Neame was looking beyond him, at the bar. ‘The extent of his treachery.’
Gaddis didn’t understand. Crane had continued working for MI6 until the 1980s. He had betrayed his country for the better part of fifty years. How could these three flimsy pages constitute the full extent of his treachery? He was suddenly sick of questions and dead ends, sick of being misled. He didn’t care if Neame was feeling unwell. He wanted answers.
‘Tom, I thought this was—’
‘I know what you thought it was.’ Neame was again touching the knot on his wool tie, as if doing so would somehow preserve the dignity of their discussion. ‘I’m not ready to give you that yet. But have a look at what there is. It should still be of considerable interest to you.’
Gaddis felt like an errant child being set a task by a particularly exacting father. He saw a word which he recognized as ‘Bletchley’ and read what Neame had scribbled underneath:
E works briefly at Bletchley in 42
First-hand access to ULTRA/ in tandem with the Carelian
Armour-piercing shells + Tiger tanks (Kurskaia Douga)
‘I’m having trouble understanding this,’ Gaddis told him, flicking to the next page. Here, Neame appeared to have copied out verbatim a passage from the memoirs.
That winter, with Cairncross’s assistance, we were able to save the lives of thousands of Soviet soldiers on the eastern Front. This was the period of the Citadel offensive. Thanks to the code-breakers, I was able to pass detailed information about Nazi troop movements to MANN, allowing the Soviet commanders to move their men out of harm’s way in good time.
MANN, Gaddis knew, was the NKVD cryptonym for Theodore Maly.
Of course, John and I did not know that our efforts were having any impact at all, but that did not lessen our sense that the work we were doing was of profound importance to the cause.
‘Which cause?’ Gaddis muttered to himself, still coming to terms with what he was seeing. Was this an extract from the memoirs? Why would Neame bother to have copied it out? What value was there in playing such a game?
Neame saw his confusion but gestured at him to continue reading.
During the same period, the Carelian was also able to obtain a list of Luftwaffe squadrons operating in the Kursk area. He became ill, so it fell to me to pass on that information to his handler. I believe that, as a result, fifteen Nazi aerodromes were bombed and 500 planes destroyed. A marvellous coup for which both John and I received The Order of the Red Banner.
‘Christ, is that true? Cairncross and Crane were both decorated?’
Neame nodded. ‘If that’s what it says.’
Gaddis went back to the first page. He pointed to the note: ‘Armour-piercing shells + Tiger tanks’, and asked Neame to elaborate.
‘Elaborate?’ The old man tapped a finger against a dried crust of skin, just beneath the hairline. ‘I believe “The Carelian” was one of the names by which John Cairncross was known to the Russians, yes?’
Gaddis nodded.
‘Well, Eddie recalls that the Soviets were able to develop armour-piercing shells capable of destroying Nazi Tiger tanks at the battle of …’ He did not appear to know how to pronounce ‘Kurskaia Douga’, so Gaddis did it for him. ‘Precisely. Again, he credits ULTRA for the intelligence which allowed for this.’
‘I see.’
Gaddis went to the final page, where Neame had written more notes.
1939. Appointed to Soviet counter-espionage at MI5. Gives names of potential Soviet defectors to MANN. Diplomats subsequently withdrawn to Moscow.
Full knowledge of counter-espionage activities in London and beyond. Ditto extent of MI5 infiltration of Communist Party.
Tell Dr SG about diplomatic bags
1943. Guy and E in Casablanca at clandestine talks between Churchill and Roosevelt.
Passed plans for the Allied landing in Sicily and the invasion of the Italian peninsula to MANN.
‘It says here you’re supposed to tell me something about diplomatic bags.’
Neame was sipping his pint. A couple of men had walked into the pub. One of them appeared to know the landlady. Above the noise of their conversation, Neame said: ‘What was that?’
Gaddis leaned forward, pointing at the back page of the manuscript.
‘Something about diplomatic bags, Tom.’
‘Search me.’
Why had the energy gone out of him again, just at the point when he needed Neame to be at his most alert? Was he play-acting, or was age really defeating him?
‘Can I get you something to eat?’
‘That would be very kind.’
Perhaps that was all that it would take. So
me bread, some soup to revive his spirits. It took ten minutes for the food to arrive, a period which Neame spent talking about the staff at the nursing home. He was bored, he told Gaddis, bored ‘out of my tiny mind’. That explains your parabolic mood swings, Gaddis thought, and bought himself another pint of lager. When the soup came, Neame took two spoonfuls of it and set the bowl to one side.
‘Did I tell you what happened to Eddie after the war?’
It was instantaneous. He was revived once again. In the space of a few seconds, Neame appeared to have regained his mental and physical acuity. Gaddis was reminded of an actor stepping back into character; it was unnerving to watch. He may have forgotten all about the manuscript, all about the diplomatic bags, preferring to talk about Crane’s experiences after the war, but as far as Gaddis was concerned, that was fine. Let the old man tell his story in his own way and in his own time. Just as long as he tells it.
‘You didn’t mention that, no.’
‘Do you know what, Sam?’
‘What?’
Neame leaned forward, almost slipping on the patched elbows of his tweed jacket. ‘I think Eddie may have experienced what might nowadays be called a nervous breakdown.’
‘Really?’
Now it was Gaddis’s turn to come forward in his chair. He felt as though he was involved in a piece of high theatre. Once or twice, in the dead of night, he had considered the possibility that Thomas Neame was nothing but a fraud, a mischievous, elderly conman spinning tall tales about a man called Eddie Crane who had never existed. That thought was not far away at this moment.
‘The truth is, we lost touch with one another.’ Neame looked depressed. ‘Eddie went to Italy in ‘47 and the next few years are a blank. We didn’t see one another, we didn’t write. I even wondered if he had been killed.’
Gaddis nodded. Where was this going? What part of the story was he attempting to spin? Two elderly ladies sat down at the next-door table and popped their napkins.
‘I think there was a boyfriend,’ Neame added, a remark which took Gaddis completely by surprise. ‘In fact, I’m sure that there was a boyfriend.’ So Crane’s sexuality was no longer a delicate subject? In the cathedral, Neame had baulked at any mention of a male lover, yet here he was, happily outing Crane at the first opportunity. Perhaps he had decided that he could trust Gaddis with even the most delicate details of his friend’s story. That was now the best-case scenario. ‘What we do know is that Guy and Donald defected, yes? A ferry to France in ‘51 and the Cambridge Ring gradually exposed.’
Gaddis nodded. He could feel his nerves quicken again at the hands of this master manipulator. Neame instinctively reached beside him for his walking stick, but his hand was shaking, like a man fumbling in the dark.
‘There’s a background to all this,’ he said. ‘To the breakdown. If you ask me, Eddie had never properly come to terms with the Pact.’
‘The Hitler-Stalin Pact?’ Gaddis looked down at the bowl of soup, which was giving off a vapour of curry powder. He wished that the landlady would take it away. ‘Seems odd that you would think that. The Pact was in ‘39, more than ten years earlier.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Neame appeared to be aware of the contradiction. Crane, after all, had continued working for the Soviets long after Stalin had allied himself to Nazi Germany. ‘The others, you see - Guy, Anthony, Kim, Donald, John - all of them had been reconciled to the treaty. But Eddie never found the justification for it. It completely shook his faith in the Soviet system. He wasn’t programmatic, he wasn’t intellectual in the way that, say, Guy and Anthony were. He didn’t see a deal with Hitler as a necessary evil. He saw it as opportunistic, as a complete rebuttal of Marx.’
‘He wasn’t alone in feeling that way.’
‘No.’ Neame seized on this, meeting Gaddis’s eye, like a traveller who has at last found a sympathetic ear. ‘Eddie came deeply to regret his association with the Soviets. He was proud of some of the things that he had achieved, some of the things that we have touched on today’ - he indicated the papers on the table in front of them, and suddenly the purpose of the notes made sense to Gaddis - ‘but he saw the direction Stalin was taking and realized that he had backed the wrong horse.’
‘So why did he keep going?’ Gaddis asked. ‘Why did he carry on working for the Russians throughout his career?’
‘He didn’t.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Eddie was a double, Sam. That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you. ATTILA was the greatest post-war coup in the history of the SIS and only a few men on the face of this Earth know about it. Eddie Crane spent thirty years convincing Moscow he was working for the KGB, but in all that time, he was secretly working for us. Isn’t that marvellous? It was an epic of disinformation. And that’s why I want the world to know his story.’
Chapter 18
Tanya Acocella had never laid eyes on Sam Gaddis, but she felt as though she knew him intimately.
She knew, for example, that he owed the Inland Revenue more than PS20,000 and was in debt to the tune of PS33,459 on two separate PS20,000 bank loans secured against the value of his house. Gaddis had also submitted an application for a further loan of PS20,000 which had recently been approved by Nat West.
She knew, having obtained a copy of his divorce settlement, that his marriage had broken up because his wife, Natasha, had begun an affair with a failed restaurateur named Nick Miller three weeks before Gaddis himself had started seeing one of his PhD students at UCL. He was paying his ex-wife monthly alimony of EU2000 via a standing order with Banco de Andalucia, and had mortgage payments amounting to around PS900 per month.
Tanya knew that Sam Gaddis downloaded Herbie Hancock albums on iTunes; that he bought most of his clothes in Zara and Massimo Dutti; that he ate take-away Lebanese at least two nights a week and rented old Howard Hawks movies from a store in Brook Green. She had read his book on Sergei Platov and was three-quarters of the way through the biography of Mikhail Bulgakov. She knew that he played squash in Ladbroke Grove every Wednesday morning and football under floodlights on Sunday evenings at six. He was popular with the students she had spoken to at UCL and widely admired by his colleagues. He had six points on his driving licence for two counts of speeding and hadn’t paid the BBC licence fee for seven years. He had attended A&E at Charing Cross Hospital, Hammersmith, with a dislocated jaw and a broken nose as a result of a fight on 5 October 1997. For a brief period, around the time of his divorce, he had been prescribed Temazepam for insomnia. He was otherwise in perfect health and had never seen a shrink. Tanya had ordered intercepts on Gaddis’s mail and had seen the postcards which he wrote to his five-year-old daughter, Min, in Barcelona. He was, by all accounts, a loving and dutiful father.
What else did she know about Sam Gaddis? That his current girlfriend, Holly Levette, was an out-of-work actress who spent a lot of time alone and was prone to bouts of melancholy which she kept hidden from Gaddis because she was increasingly serious about their relationship (an email to a friend had revealed as much). That he drank, on average, a case of wine and a bottle of whisky every month (a quick glance at his online account with Majestic had confirmed this). But it was Gaddis’s more recent Internet traffic which was of most interest to the Secret Intelligence Service. A URL history obtained from a source at AOL was alarming in its scope and intensity. It was this file which Tanya was taking to Sir John Brennan. Everything else, at this stage, was just background.
‘There’s a lot of interest in Edward Crane,’ she said, settling into the same chair in Brennan’s office at Vauxhall Cross which she had occupied at their first meeting. ‘A lot of interest in Crane and a lot of interest in Thomas Neame.’
Brennan looked out at the greying Thames. ‘I thought we’d already established that.’
Tanya betrayed no irritation at the slight.
‘It looks as though Doctor Gaddis was put on to the story by a journalist named Charlotte Berg. The late Charlotte Berg, as a matter of fact.’
&nb
sp; Brennan kept his eyes on the river. ‘Late?’
‘She died suddenly a few weeks ago.’
‘How suddenly?’ He had turned to face her now, sensing something.
‘Heart attack. She was forty-five.’
‘History of that sort of thing in the family?’
‘I don’t know, sir. I can look into it.’
‘Do that.’
Tanya returned to her notes. ‘From email traffic, it looks as though Gaddis is going to put together a book proposal which his literary agent will then sell to the highest bidder. Newspaper serialization a certainty. There’s also been a lot of research activity on an old KGB cryptonym, AGINCOURT.’
This seemed to relieve Brennan, who snorted in satisfaction.
‘AGINCOURT? He’s not chasing that wild goose, is he? Well, long may it continue. If that’s all Doctor Gaddis has got to work on, we’re in the clear.’ He let out a deep sigh. ‘Christ, I thought the Russians were on to him. Anything seedy in his cookies?’
Tanya adjusted her skirt. She wasn’t sure what Brennan had implied by Russian involvement. ‘Nothing, sir. He’s been seeing a young woman, Holly Levette, for the past few weeks. The relationship appears to be becoming quite serious.’ She might have added that Gaddis and Holly exchanged up to fifteen text messages every day, some of them very funny, almost all of them climbing a scale from the flirtatious to the highly erotic. At times, reading them, she had felt like a parent snooping on a pair of lovestruck teenagers. ‘He has substantial debts, but most of those have accrued from his divorce and from late tax payments. There’s quite a lot of alcohol being put away, but no substance abuse, no point of weakness in that area.’
‘Yet,’ said Brennan pointedly.
Tanya removed a single strand of hair from the sleeve of her jacket. She was a skilful judge of character and had a sure sense that Sam Gaddis was one of the good guys. Brennan was never going to control him with something as crass as blackmail.
‘You mentioned that Mr Neame was resident at a nursing home in Winchester,’ she said. Brennan was tapping something into a computer.
The Trinity Six (2011) Page 12
