The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [62]
Gaddis pushed back from the table, an instinct for self-preservation. He did not feel that Tretiak had lured him into a trap – she was too stoned for that – but Moscow was now a threat to him, a city closing in. He looked around the café. Any one of the office workers, the students, the kissing couple in the corner, could be surveillance operatives.
‘You shouldn’t have agreed to meet me,’ he said. ‘It’s not safe for you. You could get in a lot of trouble over this. You need to sort yourself out.’
‘Perhaps,’ she replied.
‘You must destroy the letter that I wrote to you.’
‘Take it,’ she said, instantly producing the note from the pocket of her jeans.
‘And don’t speak to anyone about this, OK? It’s for your safety as well as mine. Think of your son, Mrs Tretiak. Our conversation didn’t happen. Do you understand?’
She nodded dumbly. Gaddis surprised himself by gripping her by the arms. They were so thin he felt that he could have snapped them with a flick of his wrists.
‘Ludmilla. Focus.’ He looked into her eyes and saw that she must once have been transfixingly beautiful. All that was gone now. The waitress, changing a CD behind the counter, looked across as he released her. ‘Forget about our conversation. Forget what I have told you. About Edward Crane, about ATTILA, about your husband’s murder. It’s for your own safety, OK? Be smart. This situation is far more dangerous than I imagined.’
Chapter 21
Dresden didn’t make sense until Gaddis was somewhere over the North Sea drinking a Bloody Mary on the Aeroflot back to London. In 1985, as a fledgling spy, Sergei Platov had been posted to Dresden by the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. He would have worked alongside Tretiak. He would almost certainly have known that ATTILA was operating out of Berlin.
Gaddis spent most of the journey trying to untangle the implications of this. Why was the Russian president personally interfering in the ATTILA cover-up more than fifteen years after leaving the KGB? Had Charlotte uncovered a scandal with the potential to obliterate Platov’s career and reputation? She hadn’t mentioned anything about that at dinner; the threat from ATTILA, as she saw it, was to the British, not the Russian government. Perhaps Platov, as a loyal KGB man, was simply keen to uphold the reputation of his former employers by ensuring that the Crane story never came to light.
There was a darker possibility, of course; that Charlotte had died not from natural causes, not from a heart attack brought on by too many cigarettes and too much booze, but that she had been murdered by Platov’s cronies to ensure her silence. Trapped between a sprawling, restless teenager on the aisle, and an overweight Estonian businessman sleeping fitfully in the window seat, Gaddis picked at a freeze-dried stroganoff and a stale bread roll, his mouth dry, his appetite lost to the sickening thought that Charlotte might have become the latest victim of the Russian government’s near-psychotic determination to silence journalists, at home and abroad, who failed to toe the party line. His only cause to doubt this theory was his own continued wellbeing. Ludmilla Tretiak was also alive and well, albeit pickled in vodka and tranquilizers. Who else had Charlotte spoken to? Thomas Neame. But the old man was still going strong in Winchester. And Calvin Somers, as far as he knew, was still doing his shifts at the Mount Vernon Hospital.
Five hours later, Gaddis returned home to find that he had been contacted by a researcher at the National Archives in Kew. A woman named Josephine Warner had left a sprightly message on his landline informing him that she had dug up a copy of Edward Crane’s will. It was the last thing that Gaddis had been expecting – he had forgotten even lodging the request – but it helped to give some direction to his thoughts and he drove down to Kew the following morning, planning to continue to Winchester if he could get Peter to answer his phone. He needed to see Neame.