The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [85]
‘You think of everything,’ he said, but she knew from his eyes that he despised her.
In the room, he took four miniature bottles of whisky from the mini-bar, filled a glass and drank them as a shot. He then went into the bathroom and sat under the shower for almost half an hour. All the while, Tanya waited outside. She called Brennan in London, explained what had happened, then watched German television for reports on the shootings in Kreuzberg. At eleven o’clock, a news channel went live to Reichenburger Strasse and she recognized the door of Meisner’s apartment building, now with police tape slung across the entrance. There were shots of bewildered neighbours – old women in nightgowns, young Turkish men in jeans and T-shirts – gazing up at the windows on the second floor.
‘Turn it off,’ Gaddis told her.
She sat with him, but they barely spoke. She had ordered sandwiches from room service but Gaddis left his food untouched. At around half-past two, sedated by hunger and whisky, he finally fell into a light sleep, waking an hour later to find Tanya staring at him from an armchair across the room. She wasn’t concerned for his welfare, he reflected. She was simply making sure he didn’t make a run for it.
‘What was true and what wasn’t?’ he said. His voice was low and cracked.
‘I don’t understand the question.’
‘Was there a sixth man or wasn’t there?’
‘There was a sixth man.’
Gaddis felt a pulse of satisfaction.
‘And the details? Did Crane really work with Cairncross at Bletchley? Did he run a ring of NKVD spies out of Oxford?
Tanya shook her head. ‘I really don’t know,’ she said.
He turned on to his side. ‘What about the switch? What about Dick White? Did Crane become a double agent or did he dupe you for another thirty years?’
‘That seems very unlikely,’ she said, sounding almost dismissive, but he wanted to educate her. It occurred to him that she was young enough to be one of his students.
‘Philby went to White,’ he said. ‘Did you know that? In ’63. They were on to him, so he made a marginal confession. Told them he’d been a Soviet spy but insisted that his betrayal had been confined to the war years. Everything after that, he said, had been for Queen and Country.’ Tanya was looking at him intently. ‘And they believed him. They let him go. Philby was such an accomplished liar that the finest minds in MI5 and MI6 fell for his line of bullshit. Less than a week later he was on a ship to Moscow. Maybe Crane pulled the same trick.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, though this was no more than a hunch.
‘Why do you think people are being killed, Tanya?’ He had found a new belligerence, and took a bite from the stale club sandwich. ‘Why haven’t the British shouted from the rooftops about Crane? Do you ever think about that? Why is Sergei Platov ordering the assassination of anybody linked to ATTILA?’
‘Sam, I keep telling you, I don’t know.’ She realized now why she liked and admired him. At twenty-five, steered by ambition, Tanya Acocella had abandoned a promising career in academia for the lure of the secret world. Gaddis re presented both her past and her alternative future: a life of free enquiry, of scholarship. ‘There are elements to this operation which are so secret even I haven’t been made privy to them. Nobody on my team even knows who Crane is. As far as they’re concerned, this is just another job. My task was to find out what you knew. I wasn’t privy to your con versations in Winchester. All I know is that, under the terms of the Secrets Act, Crane was under oath never to discuss his career. That was the quid pro quo for setting him up as Neame. But obviously he’s got to the point where he wants to tell somebody about ATTILA, about what he’s done, because he’s ninety-one and doesn’t like the idea of going to his grave without people realizing what a bloody hero he is. So he told your friend, and now your friend is dead. He told her about Calvin Somers, and now Somers is dead as well. It may not be what you want to hear right now, but it’s only