‘Excuse me?’
‘Eddie was a double, Sam. That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you. ATTILA was the greatest post-war coup in the history of the SIS and only a few men on the face of this Earth know about it. Eddie Crane spent thirty years convincing Moscow he was working for the KGB, but in all that time, he was secretly working for us. Isn’t that marvellous? It was an epic of disinformation. And that’s why I want the world to know his story.’
Chapter 18
Tanya Acocella had never laid eyes on Sam Gaddis, but she felt as though she knew him intimately.
She knew, for example, that he owed the Inland Revenue more than?20,000 and was in debt to the tune of? 33,459 on two separate?20,000 bank loans secured against the value of his house. Gaddis had also submitted an application for a further loan of?20,000 which had recently been approved by Nat West.
She knew, having obtained a copy of his divorce settlement, that his marriage had broken up because his wife, Natasha, had begun an affair with a failed restaurateur named Nick Miller three weeks before Gaddis himself had started seeing one of his PhD students at UCL. He was paying his ex-wife monthly alimony of €2000 via a standing order with Banco de Andalucia, and had mortgage payments amounting to around?900 per month.
Tanya knew that Sam Gaddis downloaded Herbie Hancock albums on iTunes; that he bought most of his clothes in Zara and Massimo Dutti; that he ate take-away Lebanese at least two nights a week and rented old Howard Hawks movies from a store in Brook Green. She had read his book on Sergei Platov and was three-quarters of the way through the biography of Mikhail Bulgakov. She knew that he played squash in Ladbroke Grove every Wednesday morning and football under floodlights on Sunday evenings at six. He was popular with the students she had spoken to at UCL and widely admired by his colleagues. He had six points on his driving licence for two counts of speeding and hadn’t paid the BBC licence fee for seven years. He had attended A &E at Charing Cross Hospital, Hammersmith, with a dislocated jaw and a broken nose as a result of a fight on 5 October 1997. For a brief period, around the time of his divorce, he had been prescribed Temazepam for insomnia. He was otherwise in perfect health and had never seen a shrink. Tanya had ordered intercepts on Gaddis’s mail and had seen the postcards which he wrote to his five-year-old daughter, Min, in Barcelona. He was, by all accounts, a loving and dutiful father.
What else did she know about Sam Gaddis? That his current girlfriend, Holly Levette, was an out-of-work actress who spent a lot of time alone and was prone to bouts of melancholy which she kept hidden from Gaddis because she was increasingly serious about their relationship (an email to a friend had revealed as much). That he drank, on average, a case of wine and a bottle of whisky every month (a quick glance at his online account with Majestic had confirmed this). But it was Gaddis’s more recent Internet traffic which was of most interest to the Secret Intelligence Service. A URL history obtained from a source at AOL was alarming in its scope and intensity. It was this file which Tanya was taking to Sir John Brennan. Everything else, at this stage, was just background.
‘There’s a lot of interest in Edward Crane,’ she said, settling into the same chair in Brennan’s office at Vauxhall Cross which she had occupied at their first meeting. ‘A lot of interest in Crane and a lot of interest in Thomas Neame.’
Brennan looked out at the greying Thames. ‘I thought we’d already established that.’
Tanya betrayed no irritation at the slight.
‘It looks as though Doctor Gaddis was put on to the story by a journalist named Charlotte Berg. The late Charlotte Berg, as a matter of fact.’
Brennan kept his eyes on the river. ‘Late?’
‘She died suddenly a few weeks ago.’
‘How suddenly?’ He had turned to face her now, sensing something.
‘Heart attack. She was forty-five.’
‘History of that sort of thing in the family?’
‘I don’t know, sir. I can look into it.’
‘Do that.’
Tanya returned to her notes. ‘From email traffic, it looks as though Gaddis is going to put together a book proposal which his literary agent will then sell to the highest bidder. Newspaper serialization a certainty. There’s also been a lot of research activity on an old KGB cryptonym, AGINCOURT.’
This seemed to relieve Brennan, who snorted in satisfaction.
‘AGINCOURT? He’s not chasing that wild goose, is he? Well, long may it continue. If that’s all Doctor Gaddis has got to work on, we’re in the clear.’ He let out a deep sigh. ‘Christ, I thought the Russians were on to him. Anything seedy in his cookies?’
Tanya adjusted her skirt. She wasn’t sure what Brennan had implied by Russian involvement. ‘Nothing, sir. He’s been seeing a young woman, Holly Levette, for the past few weeks. The relationship appears to be becoming quite serious.’ She might have added that Gaddis and Holly exchanged up to fifteen text messages every day, some of them very funny, almost all of them climbing a scale from the flirtatious to the highly erotic. At times, reading them, she had felt like a parent snooping on a pair of lovestruck teenagers. ‘He has substantial debts, but most of those have accrued from his divorce and from late tax payments. There’s quite a lot of alcohol being put away, but no substance abuse, no point of weakness in that area.’
‘Yet,’ said Brennan pointedly.
Tanya removed a single strand of hair from the sleeve of her jacket. She was a skilful judge of character and had a sure sense that Sam Gaddis was one of the good guys. Brennan was never going to control him with something as crass as blackmail.
‘You mentioned that Mr Neame was resident at a nursing home in Winchester,’ she said. Brennan was tapping something into a computer.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it’s just that Gaddis drove there last week.’
He looked up. ‘You followed him?’
‘I’m afraid there wasn’t the opportunity, sir.’
‘But you think he went to see Neame?’
Tanya set the file to one side. ‘I assume so, yes. I haven’t been able to trace any email or telephone communications between the two of them.’
‘Fuck it.’ Brennan spat the words into his keyboard. ‘What the hell is Tom up to?’
Tanya felt that the question was rhetorical and did not offer a response. She had run a trace on Neame through the SIS mainframe and drawn a blank. This, in itself, had struck her as strange, even obstructive, but she felt that to raise the subject with Brennan would only irritate him further.
‘You say that Gaddis has been looking into AGINCOURT?’ he said.
‘Yes, sir.’
The Chief smiled. He had regained his composure. He knew Thomas Neame. He knew the way his mind worked.
‘Then we may not need to worry.’ He turned to the window, putting both hands against the glass. ‘You keep going with Gaddis,’ he said. ‘Press on. I think Tom may be trying to put him off the scent.’
Chapter 19
‘So Crane was never the sixth Cambridge spy?’
Gaddis could feel the whole book crumbling around him, weeks of false leads culminating in a final dead end at a mock-Tudor pub in Hampshire.
‘Come again?’
‘You spent our last meeting telling me that Crane was recruited at Trinity by Arnold Deutsch, that he was a close friend of Guy Burgess, that he ran a ring of NKVD spies out of Oxford in the late 1930s. You’re now telling me
