The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [103]
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