The Trinity Six

by Charles Cumming

  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:

  EYES ONLY / ALERT C / AUS6HAW

  . . . Wilkinson referred to the incident which, in his view, necessitated his exile to New Zealand. Plainly he still holds the Office responsible for the attempt on his life and suggested – without corroborating evidence – that SIS either arranged the assassination attempt or, at best, could have done more to protect him in its aftermath. I must record that Mr Wilkinson was behaving throughout in a manner which I can only describe as aggressive and paranoid.

  . . . Wilkinson brought our brief exchange to an end by threatening to pass Doctor Gaddis what he described as ‘chapter and verse on ATTILA’. Digital recording of the conversation states: ‘It’s time the whole story came out anyway. Christ, the British government would probably benefit [emphasis] if it did. Wouldn’t you like to see the back of that maniac [Platov]?’

  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:

  Sam, it’s me. I’m worried about something. I don’t know if you’re still in Barcelona or if you’ve come home, in which case I’m calling unnecessarily. But according to a colleague who’s been keeping me in the loop, there’s been a lot of chatter from our Russian sources. A lot of talk about Dominic Ulvert.

  There’s something else, too. The FSB know that there was a third gunman in Berlin. They’ve spoken to Doronin. He has almost certainly given them your description. As you know, I’ve been taken off the case but this has come from a reliable source. So just be careful. Don’t go to Vienna. Come home.

  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.’

  Chapter 40

  Sure enough, at around half-past two the following afternoon, wedding guests began drifting into the Stadtpark in all their finery. Gaddis had been seated at a bench beneath a gold-plated statue of Johann Strauss, reading a copy of the Herald Tribune and smoking a succession of Winston Light cigarettes. He was wearing his linen suit and carrying a notebook and pen in the inside pocket of his jacket. He had spent the morning wandering around Vienna, dutifully eating Sacher Torte at Café Pruckel and confirming to himself a long-held suspicion
that the city, though undoubtedly beautiful, was as lifeless and as irredeemably bourgeois as a Swiss museum.

  It was a bride’s idea of a perfect wedding day. Sunshine poured through the windows of the Kursalon, a neo-classical pavilion on the western perimeter of the Stadtpark, and the sky was obligingly blue for the series of photographs which a moustachioed Austrian began to take as the guests filed inside for the ceremony. Gaddis remained outdoors until, at five to three, he spotted Phil and Annie coming towards him with Kath in tow, each of them wearing a pair of thick-rimmed hangover sunglasses.

  ‘I was waiting for you,’ he said, kissing Annie and then Kath on the cheek. ‘What time did you get to bed?’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ Annie mumbled.

  They sat together in a row, on cushioned, hard-backed chairs at the centre of a gilt-ceilinged reception hall in the heart of the Kursalon. There were perhaps two hundred guests in attendance. Gaddis could only wonder how many of them were former colleagues of Wilkinson’s from SIS, or surveil-lance officers with orders to prevent Gaddis making contact with ATTILA’s final handler. At exactly five-past three, a string quartet struck up the opening bars of ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’ and Matthias Drechsel, a short man with a lumbering, agricultural gait, turned to acknowledge the arrival of his bride with an unexpected look of terror in his eyes. Catherine Wilkinson had appeared at the back of the aisle on the arm of her father, Robert. Gaddis craned to get a better look. As a sigh of appreciation rippled through the congregation, he was perhaps the only person in the room whose gaze was not fixed on the beaming bride. Wilkinson was as physically robust as his future son-in-law, but considerably more visually arresting; in his steady, humourless eyes, Gaddis sensed the unyielding determination of a career spy who would suffer no fools. He recalled the quick rage with which Wilkinson had dismissed him on the telephone – You bloody idiot. I will thank you not to contact me here again – and knew that it would take all of his charm and persuasiveness to convince him to talk.