The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [78]
Meisner emitted a strange, choked laugh. ‘Doctor Gaddis, it sounds to me as though these are questions to which you yourself should know the answer. I have nothing more. I have done nothing wrong. I was paid by MI6 to keep my mouth closed. I have kept my mouth closed. I signed your Official Secrets Act, just as once upon a time I signed a Hippocratic Oath. These things mean something to me. My reputation is important. If Benedict Meisner puts his name to something, if he makes a promise of any kind, then he keeps it. This is not a very modern concept, I grant you, but it is nevertheless essential to my own philosophy.’
There was another silence. The headphones had formed what felt like a pressure seal around Tanya’s ears and she briefly pulled them apart, feeling the sweat on her temples.
‘What about Thomas Neame?’ Gaddis asked. ‘Does that name mean anything to you?’
It was almost as if Tanya could see Meisner shaking his head. ‘I have never heard this name. Who is he please?’
She swore lightly under her breath and thought back to the Vauxhall Cross courtyard. Sooner or later, she had told Brennan, Gaddis is going to find out that Neame is the sixth man. Exactly, the Chief had said. And when he does, that’s precisely the point at which we step in. She had been furious at his deception, humiliated that her boss should have tasked her with tracking Gaddis’s movements without first supplying what was surely the most vital piece of information associated with the operation. Need to know, I’m afraid, he had told her, trying to soften the blow with one of his toadying smiles. Only a handful of people in the world know what happened to Edward Crane. Now you’re one of them.
Gaddis was doing something in his seat. Tanya could hear what sounded like a scratching of cloth and wondered if he was taking off his jacket. But then the take quality became even clearer and she realized that POLARBEAR had removed the mobile phone.
‘I have a photograph of him,’ he was saying. Tanya put two and two together as Gaddis began to click through the images in the phone’s gallery. ‘Have you seen this man before?’
She waited. There was nothing she could do to prevent what was about to happen. She heard Meisner lift out of his chair and then the noise of the phone being passed across the desk. The sound Meisner made when he saw the photograph of Neame in the pub was just what she had expected: a breath of disbelief.
‘But this is the man,’ he told Gaddis. ‘This is the man who was admitted to the hospital. The person in this photograph is not your Thomas Neame. The person in the photograph is Edward Crane.’
Chapter 28
It was only a small consolation to Gaddis that he had briefly suspected Neame and Crane of being the same man. Otherwise, he felt wretched and embarrassed, duped by a master liar. There was no memoir, he reflected. There was no memoir because Thomas Neame was the story. All that time, he had been talking to the sixth man but had been too dumb and too greedy to see it. The sensation was not dissimilar to the hollow feeling of being betrayed by a friend, or manipulated by a jealous colleague; he was humiliated, but he was also intensely angry. All his life, Gaddis had wanted to think the best of people, to take them at face value and to trust that human decency would win through. Of course, it was naïve to think this way, to believe that the world had his best interests at heart. He should have seen what Crane was up to. Here was a man, like Philby, who had lived his entire adult life as an elaborate masquerade. Crane did not so much possess a personality as a series of masks; as each mask was removed, it was replaced by another. Neame was simply the latest in a long line of parallel lives, a role played as much for Crane’s personal amusement as for the practical purpose of disguising his real identity. In his youth, Crane had pretended to the British government that he was a loyal and dedicated servant of the Crown, yet all the while he had