The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [116]
‘My mistake,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry,’ though there was no indication that the driver spoke any English. ‘I didn’t mean the Sacher. Can you take me to Südbahnhof?’
The driver now turned in his seat, a middle-aged man at the end of a long shift who didn’t much feel like being messed around by a drunk British tourist. ‘Südbahnhof?’ he said, as if Gaddis had asked him to drive to the moon. ‘No trains now.’
‘I’m meeting somebody,’ Gaddis replied and within an instant the driver had sighed and engaged first gear and swung out into the street, zipping through green lights towards the southern section of the city. They did not speak again. After a few minutes, Gaddis spotted a phone booth at the side of the road and instructed him to pull over.
‘Halt, bitte.’
‘This not station,’ the driver muttered.
‘I don’t care. Pull over.’
He paid him, a ten-euro note thrust through the window and no time to wait for the change. The pavement was covered in a puddle of thin mud which splashed against his shoes as he walked towards the payphone. There were no people in sight. The phone was covered in stickers, the box scratched by coins and knives. He dialled Tanya’s mobile.
‘Sam?’
‘I’m in a phone booth.’
‘Listen to me very carefully. We don’t have long. If your number was compromised, mine is too. It’s not safe for you out there. We’re going to get you out of Austria. Exfiltration. If they came for Wilkinson, they will come for you.’
Gaddis, stunned, did not respond. Tanya mistook his silence for scepticism.
‘Think about it. The police will almost certainly get a good description of whoever was sitting with Wilkinson tonight. They’ll be looking for you. You can’t go back to your hotel. That would be suicide. You can’t rent a car. You can’t go to a train station or out to the airport. The last thing we need is Sam Gaddis being taken into the custody of the Austrian police.’
He wondered why Tanya had started to refer to him in the third person. Is that how spooks operated? They turned you into a concept, an ‘asset’, anything to convince themselves that they weren’t dealing with a human being.
‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘the last thing Sam Gaddis wants right now is to be taken into the custody of the Austrian police.’
‘Good. Then listen. Do you still have your regular mobile phone?’
‘No. I left it in Barcelona. Everything else is back at my hotel.’
‘Don’t, whatever you do, go back there.’ He could see the logic in that request, but a stubborn part of his nature was still convinced that he had time to go back to the hotel, to pack his belongings and to leave Vienna. ‘It’s the first place they’ll wait,’ she said. ‘Do you have your passport?’
‘Tanya, everything is in my room. I came out tonight with a notebook, a pen, a packet of cigarettes. No, I don’t have my passport, I don’t even have my wallet. I’ve got about eighty euros in cash and a Tube pass. That’s it.’
A frustrated silence. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she replied eventually. ‘I need to clear this line. We need to stop talking. Get away from wherever you are and try to go somewhere safe. Find a basement. Find a bar or a nightclub. Go somewhere where you can disappear until five o’clock.’
‘What happens at five o’clock?’
‘What happens is that you’ll turn on your mobile for as long as it takes me to send you the instructions for your exfiltration. You have to trust me, Sam. Don’t go back to your hotel. We can arrange to have your stuff picked up. Go to another part of the city. Lie low for three hours. At five o’clock, I will send the instructions. As soon as you’ve received them, switch off your phone and do everything that I have told you. Understood?’
He was at once perplexed and yet humbled by her willingness to help him.
‘Understood.’
Chapter 44
Gaddis replaced the receiver. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. He was standing on a deserted street in a city that he did not know, wanted by the Austrian