want with you? What did this man say?’
‘I was instructed not to talk to your friend.’
Gaddis had the strange sensation of staring through her, into a dimension of secrets and obfuscations that he would never penetrate. He was about to ask how the Kremlin knew that Tretiak was planning to talk to Charlotte when he realized the answer to his own question: they had seen her emails. Christ, Charlotte had probably been bugged as well. That was why he had been unable to find any evidence of the Crane investigation on her computers; FSB technicians had wiped them clean. He watched Tretiak across the table, tiny and broken and shrugging her shoulders like a petulant school-girl. He wanted to shake her, to snap her out of her medicated reverie. A drizzle of rain appeared on the windows of the Coffee House as she managed a weak, consoling smile. Gaddis pressed her for more information but she remained vague and indifferent to details.
‘The official told me that I should not talk to anyone about Edward Crane. That if I was approached by any individual from the United Kingdom or America wishing to speak to me about an agent codenamed ATTILA, I was to inform them as a matter of urgency.’
Gaddis pushed back from the table, an instinct for self-preservation. He did not feel that Tretiak had lured him into a trap — she was too stoned for that — but Moscow was now a threat to him, a city closing in. He looked around the cafe. Any one of the office workers, the students, the kissing couple in the corner, could be surveillance operatives.
‘You shouldn’t have agreed to meet me,’ he said. ‘It’s not safe for you. You could get in a lot of trouble over this. You need to sort yourself out.’
‘Perhaps,’ she replied.
‘You must destroy the letter that I wrote to you.’
‘Take it,’ she said, instantly producing the note from the pocket of her jeans.
‘And don’t speak to anyone about this, OK? It’s for your safety as well as mine. Think of your son, Mrs Tretiak. Our conversation didn’t happen. Do you understand?’
She nodded dumbly. Gaddis surprised himself by gripping her by the arms. They were so thin he felt that he could have snapped them with a flick of his wrists.
‘Ludmilla. Focus.’ He looked into her eyes and saw that she must once have been transfixingly beautiful. All that was gone now. The waitress, changing a CD behind the counter, looked across as he released her. ‘Forget about our conversation. Forget what I have told you. About Edward Crane, about ATTILA, about your husband’s murder. It’s for your own safety, OK? Be smart. This situation is far more dangerous than I imagined.’
Chapter 21
Dresden didn’t make sense until Gaddis was somewhere over the North Sea drinking a Bloody Mary on the Aeroflot back to London. In 1985, as a fledgling spy, Sergei Platov had been posted to Dresden by the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. He would have worked alongside Tretiak. He would almost certainly have known that ATTILA was operating out of Berlin.
Gaddis spent most of the journey trying to untangle the implications of this. Why was the Russian president personally interfering in the ATTILA cover-up more than fifteen years after leaving the KGB? Had Charlotte uncovered a scandal with the potential to obliterate Platov’s career and reputation? She hadn’t mentioned anything about that at dinner; the threat from ATTILA, as she saw it, was to the British, not the Russian government. Perhaps Platov, as a loyal KGB man, was simply keen to uphold the reputation of his former employers by ensuring that the Crane story never came to light.
There was a darker possibility, of course; that Charlotte had died not from natural causes, not from a heart attack brought on by too many cigarettes and too much booze, but that she had been murdered by Platov’s cronies to ensure her silence. Trapped between a sprawling, restless teenager on the aisle, and an overweight Estonian businessman sleeping fitfully in the window seat, Gaddis picked at a freeze-dried stroganoff and a stale bread roll, his mouth dry, his appetite lost to the sickening thought that Charlotte might have become the latest victim of the Russian government’s near-psychotic determination to silence journalists, at home and abroad, who failed to toe the party line. His only cause to doubt this theory was his own continued wellbeing. Ludmilla Tretiak was also alive and well, albeit pickled in vodka and tranquilizers. Who else had Charlotte spoken to? Thomas Neame. But the old man was still going strong in Winchester. And Calvin Somers, as far as he knew, was still doing his shifts at the Mount Vernon Hospital.
Five hours later, Gaddis returned home to find that he had been contacted by a researcher at the National Archives in Kew. A woman named Josephine Warner had left a sprightly message on his landline informing him that she had dug up a copy of Edward Crane’s will. It was the last thing that Gaddis had been expecting — he had forgotten even lodging the request — but it helped to give some direction to his thoughts and he drove down to Kew the following morning, planning to continue to Winchester if he could get Peter to answer his phone. He needed to see Neame. Tom was still the only contact he could think of who might have information about Tretiak’s career in Dresden.
On the first floor of the archive building he asked a member of staff to point out Josephine Warner and was directed towards the enquiries desk. There were two women seated next to one another on red plastic chairs. Gaddis knew one of them on sight, an Afro-Caribbean woman called Dora who had helped him with his enquiries several times before. The second woman was new. She was in her late twenties, with black hair cut to shoulder length and a face whose beauty revealed itself only slowly as he walked towards her; in the stillness of her dark eyes, in the lucidity of her pale skin.
‘Josephine Warner?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m Sam Gaddis. You left a message on my phone yesterday.’
‘Oh, right.’ She stood up immediately, as if sprung from her seat, and turned towards the bank of cabinets behind her. Gaddis nodded as Dora gave him a smile of recognition and Warner opened a drawer, fingers flicking rapidly through a file of documents. ‘Here it is,’ she said, almost to herself, picking out a manila envelope and handing it to Gaddis.
‘It’s very kind of you,’ he said. ‘Thanks for digging it out. It could be very useful.’
‘Pleasure.’
He would happily have spoken to her for longer, but Josephine Warner was already looking beyond him, inviting the next customer with her eyes. Gaddis took the envelope to a reading table on the far side of the room, removed the Will and began to read.
The contents were relatively straightforward. Crane had left the bulk of his estate to a nephew, Charles Crane, now sixty-seven and resident in Greece. Gaddis wrote down the address in Athens. Substantial donations had been made to Cancer Research and to the SIS Widow’s Fund. The Will had been executed by Thomas Neame, to whom Crane had left ‘the contents of my library’ and witnessed by a ‘Mrs Audrey Slight’ and a ‘Mr Richard Kenner’. Addresses were given for both and Gaddis wrote them down. He had no recollection of Neame mentioning that he had acted as executor on Crane’s Will, nor that he had been left any books, but he was at least now reassured that the two men were separate individuals.
At about eleven o’clock, two hours behind Athens, Gaddis went downstairs and called international directory enquiries from a phone box in the foyer. The operator found Charles Crane’s number within a couple of minutes and Gaddis called it from his mobile. A man answered in Greek.
‘ Embros? ’
The voice sounded slightly dotty, with a laboured Greek accent. Gaddis had an image of an ageing Englishman, sunburned and decked out in linen, reading Gibbon on the steps of the Parthenon.
‘Charles Crane?’
‘Speaking.’
‘My name is Sam Gaddis. I’m an academic in London, at UCL. I’m sorry to bother you out of the blue. I’m researching a book on the history of the Foreign Office and wondered if I might be able to ask you some questions about your late uncle, Edward Crane.’
‘Good Lord, Eddie.’ It sounded as though the nephew who had benefited so handsomely from the generosity
