The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [97]
He set out from the library. He passed through a dry, barren landscape – identified on the map as the Maniototo Plain – stopping for petrol and some food in Omakau, a settlement which boasted little more than a pub and a local store. At about four o’clock, he turned from the S85 highway on to an unsealed, single-track road flanked by rivers and streams which turned a deep, sky-matching blue in the late afternoon sun. Every few hundred metres he was obliged to stop and to open farm gates, the road becoming more rugged with every passing kilometre. He was concerned that the Toyota would puncture at any moment, leaving him stranded in the centre of a vast, underpopulated plain which would soon be cloaked in darkness. Just after six, however, approximately ten kilometres inland from the main road, he at last saw a battered sign for ‘Drybread’ and turned on to a narrow, potholed trail which ran across a cultivated plain towards a screen of jagged hills. The property was a small, two-storey homestead half a mile along the trail, nestled within a rectangle of willow trees. As he steered through the gate, Brooke spotted a figure in a prehistoric Barbour chopping wood on the eastern side of the property. It was beginning to spot with rain. He switched off the engine, stepped on to the drive and was about to raise a hand in greeting when he saw Robert Wilkinson walking towards him brandishing a cold-eyed stare and a double-barrelled shotgun.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
Brooke had his hands in the air within a split second.
‘Friendly! Friendly!’ he shouted, a hangover from three eventful years with the Service in Basra. ‘I’m with the Office. I’ve come from Canberra to talk to you.’
‘Who sent you?’ Wilkinson was holding at a distance of fifty metres, shouldering the gun and keeping it levelled at Brooke’s solar plexus.
‘Sir John Brennan. It’s about ATTILA. I have a message to convey to you.’
Wilkinson lowered the gun, broke the chamber and hooked it over his wrist.
‘Convey it,’ he said.
Brooke looked around. He had been warned that Wilkinson had ‘turned a bit native’, but had, at the very least, been expecting a cup of tea.
‘Out here?’
‘Out here,’ Wilkinson replied.
‘All right then.’ He reached into the back seat of the Toyota, retrieved a North Face parka, zipped it up against the deteriorating weather and closed the door. ‘Sir John is concerned that you may be establishing a relationship with a British academic named Sam Gaddis.’
‘Establishing a relationship? What the fuck does that mean?’ Wilkinson knew, instantly, that SIS had bugged Gaddis’s call. Years of carefully cultivated anonymity had been obliterated in an instant by a reckless academic in a London phone box.
‘Doctor Gaddis has discovered the truth about ATTILA. We believe that he knows you were running Edward Crane in East Germany in the 1980s. The Service is worried that you may be passing information to Gaddis of a sensitive nature, in breach of your commitment to the Official Secrets Act.’
Wilkinson took a step forward. He was in his early sixties, stocky and imposing. His face, particularly in the fading light of a chill spring evening, had a quality of ruthlessness which had scared braver men than Christopher Brooke.
‘What’s your name, young man?’
‘My name is Christopher. I’m Head of Station in Canberra.’
‘And you’ve come all the way from Australia to tell me this, have you, Chris?’
Brooke thought of his pregnant wife, of the Qantas cabin sprayed for insects, of freeze-dried in-flight meals and the interminable roads of Central Otago. He said: ‘That is correct.’
‘And don’t they teach you to keep civilized hours at Fort Monkton any more? What do you mean by showing up here at dusk? You could have been anybody.’
Brooke had been informed that Wilkinson was ‘paranoid up to the eyeballs about Russian assassins’ and assumed that