The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [149]
Chapter 56
‘Des’, the veteran of Tanya Acocella’s Berlin surveillance operation against POLARBEAR, had been watching Holly Levette’s apartment – at Tanya’s request – for almost six hours. As luck would have it, he was parked no more than fifty metres from Alexander Grek’s blue C-Class Mercedes, which had pulled up on the corner of Tite Street and Royal Hospital Road a little after half-past four. About twenty minutes later, a Slav in his late twenties had opened the passenger door of the Mercedes and stepped inside. Des had noticed that the Slav had followed Holly down Tite Street, so he was keeping a close eye on the vehicle as the sun set over Chelsea. The two men seemed unusually preoccupied by activities in the third-floor window of Miss Levette’s apartment.
Des had started his shift before midday, so he had also noticed Dr Samuel Gaddis getting out of a taxi at about four o’clock. Recognizing his old mark from Berlin, he had immediately telephoned Tanya.
‘Strange thing just happened,’ he said. ‘You remember POLARBEAR?’
‘I remember POLARBEAR.’
‘Well, he just walked into Tite Street. I thought you said you had him under lock and key in a safe house?’
Tanya, who was in the middle of a four-hour meeting with Sir John Brennan at Vauxhall Cross, had sworn silently into the telephone and reassured Des that she would ‘cut off Sam’s balls’ when she saw him.
‘That might hurt,’ he replied. An hour later, he rang back with an update.
‘POLARBEAR’s been in there for a long time. Curtains are closed now, radio on, doubtless he’s making sweet love to sweet Holly Levette.’
‘Holly’s there as well?’
‘Yeah. Showed up about quarter of an hour ago.’
Des wondered if Tanya had developed feelings for the redoubtable POLARBEAR. Did he detect an undertow of jealousy in her voice? ‘One other thing . . .’ he said.
‘Tell me.’
‘Holly was being followed down Tite Street. Foot surveil-lance. Caucasian male, late twenties, winner of the Dolph Lundgren lookalike contest. We’ve also got a Mercedes parked across the street with a view of Holly’s sitting room. Dolph and another man sitting inside.’
‘FSB?’ said Tanya.
‘FSB,’ said Des. ‘I ran the numberplate. Vehicle is registered to the Russian Embassy.’
Chapter 57
Tanya had been led to believe that her meeting with Brennan would be a private affair. When Des rang the first time, she had just finished informing her boss that she was shielding Gaddis at her house in Earl’s Court ‘until we can work out how to protect him’. Brennan had reacted calmly to the news, just as he had seemed almost indifferent to the revelation that Acocella had activated two separate networks in Austria and Budapest in order to finesse Gaddis’s exfiltration from Vienna.
But the appearance of Maxim Kepitsa, shortly after Des had telephoned a second time, had taken Tanya by surprise. Up until that point, she had been prepared to give Brennan the benefit of the doubt. After all, Wilkinson’s assassination at the Kleines Café could have been a coincidence; she had no evidence that her boss had tipped off the FSB about Wilkinson’s movements. But Kepitsa’s demeanour, and his seedy bear-hug with Brennan shortly after he strode into the room, stank of a stitch-up.
‘Mr Kepitsa has come here today to help us try to piece together what may have happened in Vienna,’ Brennan began.
‘Is that right?’
Tanya remembered what she had said to Gaddis on the way back from Gatwick. I didn’t apply for this job so that my boss could toady up to the Kremlin and put innocent lives at risk. It was straightforward, really. She didn’t want to be answerable to a man who was prepared to overlook the cold-blooded murder of at least two British citizens in order to preserve the status quo of Westminster’s relationship with Moscow.
‘Here’s where we are on this thing,’ Brennan continued. ‘Our government has civilian and state contracts with Russia worth many billions of roubles. These would be severely compromised