The Trinity Six

by Charles Cumming

  Gaddis smiled. He set the drinks down and tried to restart the conversation.

  ‘You were saying . . .’

  ‘Saying what?’

  ‘That I wasn’t looking at the files in the right way. That I didn’t know what I was looking for.’

  Wilkinson tipped his head back. ‘Oh yes.’ He seemed almost surprised by the topic of conversation. He tapped the photograph of Yeltsin, rapping it with the back of his hand. ‘You’ve written a biography of Platov, haven’t you?’

  Gaddis drank. ‘It was more of a comparative study of Platov and Peter the Great, but—’

  Wilkinson didn’t let him finish. ‘Tell me what you know about Platov’s career in the KGB.’

  Was this another test? Gaddis would have to be careful. Wilkinson, the Head of Station in Berlin in the warmest years of the Cold War, would know far more about Platov’s brief engagement with the secret world than any historian at UCL.

  ‘I know that he was ambitious,’ he began. ‘I know that those ambitions were frustrated. Platov had a far higher estimation of his own abilities than his masters at the Lubyanka.’

  ‘That’s certainly true.’

  ‘He felt that he deserved one of the plum jobs in the West. Washington. Paris. London. Instead, he got Dresden, a backwater in East Germany. Which, I imagine, is where you first bumped into him.’

  Wilkinson looked up. His heavy, pale face was still.

  ‘What makes you think I knew him?’

  ‘Oh, you knew him,’ Gaddis replied.

  It was a risk, but it paid off. Wilkinson took a long, hard look at the crowd, grinned and turned to Gaddis. There were secrets coming.

  ‘Platov’s only trump card in East Germany was ATTILA,’ he began, ‘a moribund, seventy-year-old British spy sitting on the board of a bank in Berlin. He took a long, hard look at his life. He took a long, hard look at his career. He knew that the Soviet system was on its last legs and that Mother Russia had lost the Cold War.’

  ‘That’s not the official version.’

  ‘Of course it’s not.’ Wilkinson lowered his voice. Even with the noise of the bar, he was concerned that he might be overheard. ‘As far as all you journalists and academics are concerned, young Sergei was an unwavering patriot.’

  ‘So what’s the truth? What did he do out there? What happened to Platov that he would be prepared to murder countless innocent men and women in order to cover it up?’

  ‘You want to know?’ Wilkinson breathed in very deeply. His eyes were suddenly black in the darkness of the booth. ‘You want to know the reason why your friend was killed, the nurse, the doctor, Tretiak? You want to know why Eddie Crane had to become Thomas Neame, why Platov’s cronies planted a bomb under my car? Well, I’ll tell you.’ He was smiling now, because he was going to enjoy the look on Gaddis’s face when he told him. ‘The president of Russia, a man with eighty per cent approval ratings from his country-men, a patriot credited with restoring Russia’s economic might and sense of national pride, tried to defect to the West in 1988.’

  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 dime
nsion. 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.