The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [136]
‘Let’s go to my house,’ he said, as if they were starting the conversation all over again.
‘You’re not listening to me. It’s pointless going after the tape. Your story will never come out. It will never be allowed to come out. The government will slap a D notice on the Crane book before you’ve typed the opening paragraph.’
Gaddis seized on this.
‘I don’t believe that. I think that’s just a line you’re feeding yourself to get out of what you know we have to do. Take a look at Platov, Tanya. Isn’t it time for a change of scene in Moscow, a change of personnel?’ She shook her head, but it was the reflex of a bureaucrat. ‘Look at his record. Platov has taken Russia to within a few years of outright totalitarianism. Innocent civilians are being killed to justify illegal wars overseas. Exiles are murdered in foreign cities to silence dissent. Newspaper editors with the nerve to challenge the orthodoxy are left to die in hospital. Fuck the D Notice. If we can get hold of that tape and get it broadcast, even if it’s just on the Internet, we have the power to put that scumbag out of office.’
Tanya was gliding past a convertible MG.
‘Five minutes,’ she said. ‘That’s it. That all I’m giving you. Five minutes.’
Chapter 50
They parked three hundred metres from Gaddis’s front door, at the northern end of the street.
‘This isn’t my house,’ he said.
‘I’m aware of that. What number are you?’
‘I thought you knew everything about me, Josephine. You must be getting sloppy.’
Tanya explained that she would walk down the street and check for surveillance around Gaddis’s house. If there were Russian or British watchers positioned outside – in vehicles, in a first- or second-floor stakeout, dressed as street cleaners or parking attendants – she would be able to identify them.
‘Give me ten minutes,’ she said and stepped out of the car.
Gaddis smoked a cigarette while he waited. He saw one of his neighbours coming towards him, a widow walking her poodle, and ducked down in his seat, scrabbling around on the floor of the Renault until she had passed. Tanya came back just as he was dropping the cigarette butt into a storm drain.
‘Everything seems clear,’ she said, starting the engine. ‘I walked up to Uxbridge Road, came back down the other side, had a look around. But they may have a trigger on your front door. If you go in, it will tell them you’re back and they’ll send somebody round faster than the time it’s taking me to tell you about it. So you don’t have long. Get the tape, get your papers, get your toothbrush and your razor, then get out of there.’
She drove up to the house. Gaddis was obliged to negotiate a hop-scotch of pavement gob and dog turds en route to his front door, deposited by boxer dogs and uncastrated Dobermans whose owners used the street as a rat run between White City and the pubs and betting shops on Uxbridge Road. He put the larger of his two house keys into the Chubb lock and turned it, as he had turned it a thousand times before. He inserted the Yale and lifted the latch. His frayed nerves half-expected the obliteration of an explosion, the scream of an alarm, but the door opened and he found himself in the hall of his house, home again.
There was a small package on the doormat, addressed to Dr Sam Gaddis ‘BY HAND’, next to a bank statement and some junk mail. He went into the sitting room and walked straight towards the files in the corner of the kitchen. They may have a trigger on your front door. He turned each of the boxes upside-down so that their contents sprayed across the floor. It was like watching stones sliding on ice. Everywhere he looked there was paper. Gaddis could not remember which of the boxes contained the tapes and looked around in increasing desperation for signs of a package or cassette.
Wilkinson’s letter to Katya was still on the kitchen table, which he took as a sign that no one had broken into the house during his