The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [131]
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I asked you, what was the purpose of your visit to Budapest?’
‘Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you properly.’ Somehow, Gaddis remembered how to lie. ‘I was visiting a friend. Pleasure, not business.’
The guard seemed momentarily satisfied by the speed and concision of this reply but soon returned his gaze to the photograph. He looked up at Gaddis’s face. He looked back down at the photograph. He looked up again, obliging Gaddis to stand slightly straighter at the desk. Then, to Gaddis’s horror, he took out a magnifying glass and began studying the photograph, like a diamond dealer examining a stone for flaws. His right eye was pressed up against the passport, roaming across the page, checking every watermark, every cross-hatch, every pixel of the forgery. Gaddis switched the plastic bag from his left hand to his right and looked beyond the desk at the safety of the Departures area, trying to appear calm. It was like an oasis that he would never reach. At any moment he was expecting to be asked to step aside and to accompany the guard into an interrogation room.
‘Thank you, Mr Tait. Enjoy your flight.’
Gaddis managed not to snatch back the passport in wild relief. Moments later he was standing in an area reserved for smokers, drawing deeply on a cigarette and silently giving thanks for the brilliance of Tanya Acocella. He felt now that, unless he was profoundly unlucky, there was no threat to him, either from the airport police or from Russian surveillance.
Within two hours, the easyJet had landed at Gatwick. Gaddis had managed to close his eyes for twenty minutes during the flight, snatching some much-needed sleep at a window seat. Yet he felt no sense of joy as the plane landed in a drizzly England, no welcome glow of homecoming. If anything, it felt as though he was walking back into a trap from which he had just escaped. It was as though he knew that his problems had not come to an end; they were only now beginning.
Everything was fine until he was ready to pass through customs. He had collected his bag from the carousel, been effusively thanked by an elderly couple whom he had helped with their suitcases, and carried his own luggage towards the green channel at the far end of the hall. He was no more than ten feet from freedom when a customs officer stepped across his path, pointed at the leather case and indicated to Gaddis that he should move to one side.
‘Could I just take a look at that, please, sir?’
Gaddis felt a wretched sense of disappointment. As he moved towards a row of low, steel tables at the side of the hall, he was convinced he was the victim of a set-up. In years gone by, he had passed through Customs a dozen times with more than his fair share of Camels and Glenlivet; now his luck was up. He knew, in the way that you know of a sickness coming, that somebody had tampered with his bag. It was the only probable outcome. Ahead of him was a greyed-out mirror, smudged and scratched, on the other side of which he could imagine a line-up of grinning MI6 officers, Tanya among them, observing his final moments. Had she betrayed him, or did he look so strung-out that the officer had no choice but to question him? Gaddis put the leather case and the plastic bag on the counter. The customs officer was in his mid-forties and slightly overweight, with pale, indoor skin and a short-sleeved shirt which fitted him too loosely. He peered into the plastic bag, inspected the bar of Toblerone, picked up the copies of The Tipping Point and the Guardian Weekly, then replaced them. It was as though he was deliberately killing time until he went for the case.
‘Could you just open this up for me, please, sir?’
It was the politeness of the request that grated on Gaddis, the sense of procedure being followed, of sticking to the letter of the law. They make you open the bag yourself so that you can’t later accuse them of planting evidence. They make you open the bag