The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [111]
‘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