The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [75]
Gaddis hadn’t been to Berlin since 1983, when he had been a student on a school trip peering over the Berlin Wall at East German border guards who stared back through war-issue binoculars, trying to put a gloss on their boredom. The span of time put Gaddis in a contemplative mood and for five long minutes he stood directly beneath the Brandenburg Gate, reflecting on how the city had changed in the past quarter of a century and pressing the palms of his hands against the stonework in a moment of sentimental contemplation which sent Ralph into paroxysms.
‘He’s doing something weird underneath the Gate,’ he told Tanya, speaking into a mobile phone. ‘Looks like he’s stretching his back. It might be a signal.’
‘Hold your position,’ Tanya replied. ‘Let’s see who shows up.’
But nobody showed up. POLARBEAR eventually walked towards the Reichstag, seemed to be put off by the length of the queue taking tourists inside to gape at Norman Foster’s dome, then retraced his steps and spent fifteen minutes on the south side of the Brandenburg Gate, strolling around the Holocaust Memorial.
‘Don’t lose him in there,’ Tanya warned Ralph, because she knew that the Memorial was a five-acre maze of granite blocks, some as high as fifteen feet, into which Gaddis could quickly disappear. She was now sure that he was using amateur trade-craft – hence his little platform jig at Waterloo Station – and it was certainly not beyond his capabilities to have arranged to meet Meisner in the centre of the Memorial, where they could not possibly be overheard.
Meanwhile, Katie had ridden her bike to the corner of Ebert and Hannah-Arendt Strasses, at the south-western edge of the Memorial, working on the assumption that POLAR-BEAR would eventually come out and make his way south towards Checkpoint Charlie.
‘I reckon he’s just doing the tourist thing,’ she said, a view with which Tanya and Ralph concurred when POLARBEAR’s head was observed poking out from a granite block twenty feet from the street. Moments later, Gaddis had emerged on to Hannah-Arendt, lit a cigarette, and walked east on to Friedrichstrasse, where he stood beside a postbox, looking around for a cab.
‘He’s obviously waiting for a taxi,’ Ralph duly announced, and Tanya ordered the Audi to within two hundred metres of his position while Ralph looked around for a cab of his own.
‘This is it,’ she said. ‘Don’t lose him.’
They didn’t. The Audi got there in three minutes and tailed POLARBEAR all the way to Prenzlauerberg, a fashionable quarter of former East Berlin where the city’s bohemian elite bought their vinyl records and drank their lattes. Ralph found a taxi two minutes after Gaddis but was called off after being reassured by Des that the ‘situation is very much under what I like to call control’. At 15.46 Gaddis was observed paying the driver of the cab and stepping out on to Schönhauser Allee.
‘He’s a block from Meisner’s office,’ Tanya declared, looking down at a map of Berlin. She had visited the location at nine o’clock the previous evening. ‘Let’s see if we can get his phone to work.’
POLARBEAR’s mobile was her only potential problem. Two days earlier, when Gaddis had left it unattended in his office at UCL, an SIS technician had succeeded in installing a piece of software which turned the phone into a remotely activated microphone. The bug had worked once, successfully, when Ralph had tested it from a car parked outside Gaddis’s house, but things were always more complicated