The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [84]
‘What about Berlin?’ Tanya asked. She pulled the car into a quiet residential street and switched off the engine. ‘Who knew you were coming to meet Meisner?’
‘Just you,’ he replied. ‘Just Josephine Warner.’
She ran a hand through her hair, pushing away the slight. ‘What about Holly?’
‘What about her?’ Gaddis could glimpse another nail being landed in the coffin of his humiliation. ‘Is she one of yours too?’
‘Holly has nothing to do with us.’
‘Then why did she give me the files on the KGB?’
‘What files?’
‘Never mind.’
The street was deserted. He could smell Tanya’s perfume, the same scent that had drifted towards him at Kew. He was still drawn to her and he hated that about himself.
‘Don’t worry about the gun,’ she said suddenly, and again he had the feeling of being removed from himself, of looking at Sam Gaddis in the third person. ‘There’ll be fingerprints, but to the best of my knowledge, you don’t have anything on record. Is that the case?’
Of course. They knew all about him. They had combed through his past. MI6 would know about the divorce, about Min, about his work at UCL. Everything he had said and done for weeks had been analysed by Tanya Acocella.
‘That is the case,’ he said quietly.
There was nothing else to do but to go back to the Novotel. Tanya explained that one of the members of the surveil-lance team had taken a room on the third floor. By now, Gaddis was so numb to surprise that he merely nodded, his mind fixed on an image of Meisner’s brain which he could not erase.
‘We need to get rid of your jacket,’ she said, and Gaddis gave it to her without objection, then watched as she stepped out of the car and dropped it in a nearby bin. It was an old jacket, a cherished gift from his late father, but he felt no dismay; she might as well have been throwing away a newspaper. Tanya then made a call to Des and instructed him to buy two tickets to London on the first available flight out of Berlin. Twenty minutes later, he had rung back, telling her they were booked on a British Midland out of Berlin Tegel at 8 a.m.
‘My car’s at Luton,’ Gaddis said.
‘Somebody will pick it up for you.’
They drove back towards Tiergarten station, along the banks of the Landwehrkanal, the oblivious city slipping by. Tanya felt desperately sorry for him, wondering what must be going through his mind and regretting that it had been necessary to involve this decent man in a world that had now all but destroyed him.
‘I want you to promise me something,’ she said when she had parked at the hotel. They had been driving in silence for ten minutes.
‘What’s that?’
‘You can’t go to the police. Do you understand that, Sam?’ Gaddis did not reply.
‘If you turn yourself in, we can’t help you. The Russians will know who you are. You will face months, even years of legal problems in Berlin, and eventually Platov’s people will find you. Allow us to strike a deal with the Germans.’
He nodded, but she could not be sure if he had agreed.
‘We can protect you in England,’ she said. She needed to be absolutely certain of his co-operation. ‘We can make arrangements with the German authorities. Your involvement in what happened this evening need never come to light.’
‘You can’t possibly make a guarantee of that kind.’
Tanya reached for his hand and squeezed it. The gesture surprised both of them.
‘Let me at least try to convince you that I can. Stay in your room tonight. Leave with me in the morning. When we’re back in London, I promise you that everything will become easier.’
‘Easier,’ he said, wiped out by shock. He was hungry and craved a cigarette, but realized that he had left his packet in the inside pocket of a jacket which was now in a bin on the other side of Berlin.
They went into the hotel. Tanya walked beside him and, as they came into the lobby, put her arm around his back, whispering to him.
‘We are lovers,’ she said. ‘You are happy.’
It was enough of a trick to take them past any snooping eyes at