The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [45]
So Calvin Somers panicked. He knew that there was a gate into the woods, and a path, but it was at least a hundred metres away, so he tried to climb over the fence which ran around the wood and caught his fleece on a stretch of barbed wire in the process. As it tore, he swore under his breath, looking back to check if he was still being followed. The Russian had disappeared. Somers was standing in dense undergrowth, with no way of hiding nor of reaching any of the paths in the wood without cutting and scratching himself on a wall of thorns and bushes. He was, in effect, trapped. So, with an odd sense of embarrassment, he decided to climb back over the fence and to return to the field. It would be safer out in the open, he told himself. Somebody might walk past and see him.
That person was Nicolai Doronin. Guided by Stieleke on a mobile phone, Doronin had jogged around the northern edge of the cornfield and completed a pincer movement by circling back towards the woods into which Somers had just disappeared. Somers saw him as he clambered back over the fence, gingerly holding his fleece, and almost waved in relief. This man looked more local: he was shaven-headed and wearing a shell-suit and a pair of expensive-looking trainers. Somewhere, in the depths of the field, he probably had a Bull Mastiff or a Doberman busily chasing rabbits.
Then Somers looked to his right. The Russian was suddenly beside him, and springing at him like a cat. Somers was on the ground before he realized that the second man, the shell-suit, was also there, close in against the fence, and he felt an awful, irretrievable shame as he let them go about their business. In a sense, he had been expecting this and still believed, in some vague, hopeful way, that it would just be a beating, just a lesson from the FSB, a few kicks to the stomach, a blow to the head, maybe a black eye at work for a couple of weeks.
After a minute or so, however, Calvin Somers knew that it wasn’t going to end. He felt a warmth in his body which was more than sweat and realized that something wasn’t right in his stomach. One of the men had used a blade on him. He started to beg them to stop and hated himself for pleading, but it was all that he could do. It was all that he had ever done. Were they going through his pockets? Was one of them going through his bag? It seemed as though only one of the men was left now and that he was the one who had done all the damage. Was that right? Somers couldn’t focus. The blood in his gut was turning cold and he wondered about the woods. If he could just get into the woods again, maybe back on to the path. If he could get away, all this would stop happening.
But it would never stop. Somers knew that he wasn’t ever going to stand up again. Had they meant to go this far? Had they meant to kill him?
He shouldn’t have talked to Charlotte Berg. He knew that now, just as he knew that he was never going to make it back home. And he passed in and out of consciousness with the sorry realization that she, too, had been murdered by these men. Why hadn’t he realized that Charlotte Berg hadn’t died of a heart attack?
He wondered if her friend knew, the academic. What was his name? For some reason, Somers couldn’t remember. He wondered if he should get a message to him, to somehow let him know that his friend had been killed. Somers tried to reach for his phone but found that it had disappeared.
Sam Gaddis. That was it. Gaddis. He should try to call him. He should try to get in touch. Somebody needed to let this guy know that the things he was getting himself involved in were going to get him killed.
Chapter 17
There was a seven-mile traffic jam on the M3 out of Winchester, which gave Gaddis all the time he needed to digest what Neame had told him about Eddie Crane’s year at Oxford. If true, it was an astonishing story.
In the summer of his