The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [61]
Gaddis looked down at his lukewarm tea and drank it, just to give himself something to do with his hands. Tretiak was gazing out of the window, like a teenage girl bored by her date.
‘It’s interesting,’ he said. ‘My understanding of what happened to your husband is quite different.’
‘Go on,’ she said.
Gaddis lowered his voice beneath the clatter and chat of the café. There was music playing on a broken stereo; it sounded as though the speakers were fizzing. ‘Look, I know that it’s hard for you. I know that you have no reason to trust me—’
‘Doctor Gaddis—’
He spoke over her interruption.
‘But this is what I know. The source your husband was running had been working for Russian intelligence for almost fifty years. His KGB cryptonym was ATTILA. He was the greatest Western asset on the books at Moscow Centre for decades – but he was a double agent.’
Tretiak’s mouth parted very slowly, strands of saliva appearing between her lips like a thin glue.
‘How do you know this?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.’
‘You cannot tell me who has levelled this accusation?’
‘Mrs Tretiak, what I am suggesting to you today is that the KGB wanted to cover up the existence of ATTILA. They wanted to save themselves the embarrassment of being deceived by the British Secret Intelligence Service. So they killed anybody who had anything to do with him. They murdered your husband to silence him.’
‘What was Crane’s position in Berlin?’ she asked. Lines had appeared in the light foundation around her eyes, further cracks in the mask. Gaddis recalled a detail from the obituary in The Times.
‘He was on the board of a German investment bank which had offices in Berlin.’
She swore under her breath. For the first time, Gaddis caught a vapour of alcohol, sharp and full.
‘Why do you swear?’ he asked.
‘Why do I swear?’ She laughed so loudly that several customers turned to look at them. ‘It’s just that only recently I was told never to speak about this affair.’
Gaddis wasn’t sure that he had heard her correctly. Then why had she responded so freely to his letter? Why had she come down to the café?
‘What do you mean?’
‘It was only last month, shortly after Berg had been in contact with me.’ Tretiak said ‘Berg’ as if she had no energy for the full name. ‘I received a visit from a government official.’
Gaddis felt a threat in his gut, tugging at him like the grinding traffic outside.
‘What does that mean? Somebody from Belyi Dom came to see you?’
Belyi Dom was the Russian translation of White House, the seat of government in Moscow. Tretiak nodded. She looked weary, almost bored. She might have been talking about a visit from a postman or a plumber. ‘This man told me that he was under instructions from Sergei Platov himself.’
‘Platov?’ Gaddis couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘I don’t follow, Mrs Tretiak. What would the President want with you? What did this man say?’
‘I was instructed not to talk to your friend.’
Gaddis had the strange sensation of staring through her, into a dimension of secrets and obfuscations that he would never penetrate. He was about to ask how the Kremlin knew that Tretiak was planning to talk to Charlotte when he realized the answer to his own question: they had seen her emails. Christ, Charlotte had probably been bugged as well. That was why he had been unable to find any evidence of the Crane investigation on her computers; FSB technicians had wiped them clean. He watched Tretiak across the table, tiny and broken and shrugging her shoulders like a petulant school-girl. He wanted to shake her, to snap her out of her medicated reverie. A drizzle of rain appeared on the windows of the Coffee House as she managed a weak, consoling smile. Gaddis pressed her for more information but she remained vague and indifferent to details.
‘The official told me that I should not talk to anyone about Edward Crane. That if I was approached by any individual from the United Kingdom or America wishing