The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [146]
A clear plastic folder. A DVD. Not a tape, not a cassette, but a DVD. Written in marker pen on the front of the disk were the words ‘P INTERVIEW 88 I’. Gaddis felt a rush of excitement, almost as if his skin was humming, but it was checked by the realization that this was not the master tape. Wilkinson must have made a copy on to DVD and kept the original in New Zealand. Or did MI6 have the master tape in a vault at Vauxhall Cross? At the same time, he experienced a profound fear that he was about to be disturbed. Had he come so close to his prize only to have it snatched away at the last minute? He had heard no sound in the basement, no voices on the stairs, only the noise of the occasional car or ped estrian passing on Tite Street. But he knew that he would have to move fast. He put the DVD into the inside pocket of his coat, switched off the store-room light, closed the door and looped the broken padlock over the handle to give an impression of security. Then he turned, walked back down the passage and opened the fire door leading back towards the stairs.
Holly was coming towards him, carrying a set of keys and a bag from Marks & Spencer.
‘Sam? What are you doing here?’
‘No time to explain,’ he said, grabbing her arm and spinning her back up the stairs. ‘You have a DVD player in your flat, don’t you? We need to sit down and watch some TV.’
Chapter 54
Fifteen minutes earlier, Alexander Grek had pulled his blue, C-Class Mercedes into a vacant parking space on the corner of Tite Street and Royal Hospital Road and made a call on his mobile phone. Karl Stieleke had picked up and informed Grek that he was less than a quarter of a mile away, walking down King’s Road half a block behind Holly Levette. She was on her way back from an audition and had just gone into Marks & Spencer. Stieleke anticipated that she would be home within ten or fifteen minutes.
Three days earlier, the two men had broken into Holly’s apartment and conducted a two-hour search for any trace of the documents that had purportedly been sent to her late mother, Katya, by Robert Wilkinson. Grek had been acting on instructions from Maxim Kepitsa, who had himself been tipped off about the relationship between Wilkinson and Levette by Sir John Brennan. Grek and Stieleke had looked on every shelf, in every drawer, under every carpet and inside every cupboard of the apartment, but had found no sign of any material relating to Sergei Platov or the KGB. They had subsequently put a tap on Holly’s T-Mobile account and overheard a fraught telephone call from ‘Sam’, logged that afternoon at 1521 hours and traced to a phone box near Cromwell Road.
‘Sam’ had made reference to a ‘tape or cassette’ apparently stored in the basement of Holly’s building. It was the one place that Grek had not thought to look. He would now wait for Holly to search the basement and to obtain the tape, then follow her to the Donmar Warehouse. This would lead him to ‘Sam’, who was the final link in the chain. Grek suspected that Sam would turn out to be the same man who had shot Nicolai Doronin in Berlin. An eyewitness in Vienna had provided a description of ‘an Englishman in his early forties’ who had been sitting with Robert Wilkinson at the Kleines Café. Grek suspected that this was also ‘Sam’. Once he had been eliminated, Grek assumed that Kepitsa would consider the ATTILA case closed. He was not aware that Gaddis had entered Holly’s building less than an hour earlier.
Looking up, he saw Holly coming down Tite Street carrying a shopping bag full of M & S groceries. Stieleke