The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [87]
‘Of course.’ Gaddis made no attempt to disguise the contempt in his voice. ‘Your complicated love life.’
They checked in at seven. In the security area, Gaddis was obliged to remove his boots and a leather belt from his jeans, but was glad to have something to occupy his hands as he queued in front of the scanner; it was the standing around, the waiting, which made him despondent and anxious. For the next fifteen minutes they loitered in a bookshop, flicking through paperbacks and guides to Berlin. Tanya occasionally attempted to engage Gaddis in polite conversation, but he knew that it was solely for cover and his replies were monosyllables of indifference. Forty minutes before they were due to take off, they made their way in silence along a series of strip-lit corridors to passport control.
‘I’ll do the talking,’ Tanya said, settling into the queue, but when the time came to approach the booth, their respective passports barely merited a glance from the customs official. At this early hour, they were simply waved through with a stifled yawn.
Gaddis slept most of the way back but the brief rest did nothing to lighten his mood. Landing in London, the wretchedness of Friday’s events settled on him again. He thought continually of Charlotte and of the obliterated skull of Benedict Meisner. There was a driver waiting for them in Arrivals, another Des wearing a pair of jeans and a nylon anorak, holding a sign which said ‘JOSEPHINE WARNER’ in bold, handwritten capital letters. Gaddis saw it and felt a lurch of anger: the double-life was all around him. He longed to be free of it, to be in Barcelona with Min or away in Paris with Holly, to go back to the life he had known before Charlotte’s death.
‘You’re going to go home,’ Tanya told him when they had made their way to the car park at Gatwick and settled in the back seat of a bottle-green Vauxhall Astra. ‘There’s no need to come with us, no reason to fear for your safety. As far as we are aware, nobody else has been looking at your Internet traffic, nobody else has been listening to your phone calls. The man in the apartment was obviously waiting for Meisner. He was the next link in the chain after Charlotte and Somers. For some reason, the Russians don’t know about you. You should feel very grateful for that.’
‘Well, I guess that’s one advantage of having MI6 snooping around in your dustbins,’ Gaddis replied. It was a damp, featureless morning in England, no blue in the sky. ‘They can at least reassure you that they’re the only organization committing a flagrant breach of your privacy.’
Tanya had grown accustomed to his fractious moods. She was sympathetic to them, but knew that she had a duty to toe the party line.
‘Look, Sam, I’m trying to tell you that this has worked out very well for you. You can go back to your life. You can live normally. It will be like none of it ever happened.’
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized the mistake. Gaddis turned on her.
‘I think Charlotte being murdered happened, Tanya.’
‘I know. That’s not what I meant, I’m sorry—’
‘Calvin Somers’s death happened.’
She reached to touch his arm. ‘Sam—’
‘Last night, an innocent man lost his life because sixteen years ago he was dumb enough to go into business with MI6. Benedict Meisner’s assassination happened. How am I supposed to forget that? In what way can I go back to a “normal life”?’
Tanya tried a different approach. ‘What I’m telling you is that you have to forget about it.’ She was under no illusions that things were going to be easy. ‘Just as you have to forget about the book. That’s the deal we’re making. That’s the only choice you’ve got.’
Gaddis knew that there was no point in arguing with her. She was on her way to see the great and the good of MI6, men with sufficient influence to have his involvement in the shooting erased from the record. That was their speciality, after all – the rewriting of history. Tanya had promised that MI6 would ‘strike a deal with the Germans’. In return,