The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [101]
The first fourteen hotels had ‘no record at all of a wedding booked under that name’, but the fifteenth – the SAS Radisson on Schubertring – knew all about it and asked Gaddis for his surname.
‘It’s Peters,’ he said. ‘P-E-T-E-R-S. Peters.’
‘Yes, Mr Peters. And when would you like to arrive?’
Gaddis now moved to the next phase of his strategy. He needed a precise date for the wedding, so he said: ‘Could you tell me if any of the other guests are arriving on the Thursday evening? Would that be too early, do you think?’
‘Thursday the twenty-third, sir? Let me see.’
Then it was just a question of whether the ceremony would take place on the afternoon of Friday twenty-fourth or Saturday twenty-fifth.
‘Mr Peters?’
‘Yes.’
‘It is difficult to say, sir. We have a number of guests arriving on Thursday evening, but the majority appear to be checking in on Friday.’
So, the reception would be on Saturday twenty-fifth. ‘I see,’ he said.
Gaddis had played along for a few moments more, requesting a double room for the Friday and Saturday nights, but when it came to divulging his full name and address, he had pretended that he had ‘an important call coming through on another line’ and promised the receptionist that he would complete the booking online.
‘Of course, Mr Peters. Of course. We very much look forward to seeing you in Vienna.’
Chapter 37
Two days later, Gaddis left London for Spain, catching an evening flight from Heathrow to Barcelona. He experienced no difficulties at passport control, but assumed that SIS would have Natasha’s apartment under tight surveillance. His plan was straightforward: to spend a few days in Spain with Min and then to go to Austria by train. Under the terms of the Schengen Agreement, it was possible to travel all the way to Vienna without displaying a passport; Gaddis assumed that this would make the task of tracking him considerably more complicated. He planned to arrive at the Radisson on the evening of Friday twenty-fourth, in time to mingle with the other guests. He would pretend to be a friend of the Drechsel family, discover the location of the wedding reception and perhaps accompany some of his new-found friends to the service the following day. That would bring him into direct contact with Robert Wilkinson.
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