master spy. Gaddis felt relieved, because this second image conformed far more closely to his mental picture of Crane. Furthermore, it put to rest any lingering doubts he might have possessed that Crane and Neame were the same person. It was not difficult, for example, to imagine the man in the photograph as an avuncular figure passing himself off as a patrician banker in Berlin; at the same time, Crane’s face had a bohemian quality, the eyes betraying a wild streak bordering on the eccentric. Gaddis could only guess at the secrets stacked up behind those eyes, five decades of bluff and counter-bluff, culminating in the mysteries of Dresden.
He was not to know that Charles Crane did not exist. The man Gaddis had spoken to on the telephone was one Alistair Chapman, a colleague of Sir John Brennan’s from an era in which the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service had been a mid-level officer operating in Cold War Vienna. Chapman had agreed to allow SIS to divert an Athens phone number to his London home and to masquerade as Crane’s nephew as a favour to Brennan. The Chief had been delighted with his performance.
‘Thank you, Alistair,’ he had said, speaking to Chapman that evening. ‘I doubt that in the long history of the Secret Intelligence Service we have ever employed a more distinguished backstop.’
The photographs that Charles Crane had supposedly posted to Gaddis were, in fact, pictures of a former SIS officer named Anthony Kitto, who had died in 1983. Brennan had simply dug them up from an archive and placed them in the envelope. Gaddis, of course, was none the wiser, and even made a mental note to write Crane a letter of thanks as he turned to his other post.
There was a letter from a colleague in America, a postcard of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia signed by Min and, at the bottom of the pile, a bank statement from Barclays. He was in the habit of throwing away correspondence from the myriad organizations to which he owed money, but on this occasion he glanced at the statement and was surprised to see that his balance was healthier than he had imagined. Over a month after he had handed Calvin Somers a cheque for?2000, the money had still not been cashed. The cheque had been post-dated, but at least two weeks had passed in which Somers could have presented it to his bank.
Gaddis was confronted by a dilemma. He could cross his fingers and hope that Somers had forgotten about the cheque, but it was hopeless to think that a man as grasping and as manipulative as that would simply forget he was sitting on two grand. More likely Somers had lost the cheque and would come asking for a replacement in three or four weeks’ time. The last thing Gaddis needed was somebody asking him for two grand in the run-up to Christmas. By then, any cheque he wrote would almost certainly bounce. He ran through the address book in his mobile phone, found the number of the Mount Vernon Hospital and called Somers’s office.
The call was diverted to the main switchboard. Gaddis was fairly sure that the woman who answered was the same bored, impatient receptionist who had brushed him off in September.
‘Could you put me through to Calvin Somers, please? I’m having difficulty getting him on his direct line.’
There was an audible intake of breath. It was definitely the same woman; she sounded irritated even by this modest request.
‘Can I ask who’s speaking, please?’
‘Sam Gaddis. It’s a personal call.’
‘Could you hold?’
Before Gaddis had a chance to say ‘Of course’, the line went dead and he was left holding the receiver, wondering if the connection had been lost. Then, just as he was on the point of hanging up and re-dialling, a man picked up, coughing to clear his throat.
‘Mr Gaddis?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re looking for Calvin?’
‘That’s right.’
Gaddis heard the awful hollow pause which precedes bad news.
‘Could I ask what your relationship was with him?’
‘I’m not sure that I understand the question.’ Gaddis instinctively knew that something was wrong, and regretted sounding obstructive. ‘Calvin was helping me with some research on an academic thesis. I’m a lecturer at UCL. Is everything all right?’
‘I am very sorry to tell you that Calvin has been involved in a terrible incident. He was mugged on his way home from work. Attacked, you might say. I’m surprised you didn’t see the reports in the newspapers. The police are treating it as murder.’
Chapter 24
Gaddis was standing in the same room in which he had learned of Charlotte’s death, but his reaction on this occasion was quite different. He hung up the phone, turned towards the shelves of books which lined one side of his cramped office and experienced a sensation of pure fear. For a long time he was almost motionless, his stalled brain trying to deny the inescapable logic of what he had been told. If Calvin Somers had been murdered, Charlotte had most probably been killed by the same assailants. That meant that his own life was in danger and that Neame and Ludmilla Tretiak were also threatened. Gaddis found that he began to think about himself in the third person, as an entity separate and distinct from his own familiar, protected existence; it was some kind of brain trick, an atavistic impulse to deny the truth of his predicament. But the truth was inescapable. Whoever had killed Somers would now surely direct their attention towards him.
He continued to stare blankly at the bookshelves, his eyes jumping from spine to spine. Should he go to the police? Could he claim that Charlotte had been murdered? Who would believe him? There had been no evidence of foul play at the house in Hampstead. Charlotte had a weak heart and an unhealthy lifestyle; that was it. Besides, she had been cremated; it was too late to carry out an autopsy. Gaddis did not know why Somers had been killed or who had perpetrated the act. His best guess was Russian intelligence, but why murder a man simply for knowing that Edward Crane’s death had been faked by MI6? The British themselves might be involved, but would they kill one of their own citizens simply for breaking the terms of the Official Secrets Act? It didn’t seem likely.
He tried to clear his mind. He tried to be logical. Fact: the Russian espiocracy was systematically eradicating anybody with links to ATTILA. But if that was the case, why had the embassy in London given him a tourist visa ten days earlier, no questions asked, allowing him to pass unchecked through Sheremetyevo? This small thought offered Gaddis a brief moment of solace until he realized that there was every chance the FSB could have deliberately allowed him to fly into Russia in order to follow him around Moscow and to isolate his contacts. If that was the case, he would have led them straight to Ludmilla. Turning from the bookshelves, he opened the window of his office, inhaled a lungful of dank London air and stared up at a black, pre-rain sky. It felt as though he had no moves left; the conspiracy was too large, the main players either dead or far beyond his reach. Who could he talk to who might be able to shed light on what was happening?
Neame.
Gaddis grabbed his jacket and bag, locked his office and took the Tube to Waterloo. He called Peter from a phone box near the ticket hall but the number still wasn’t picking up. A Winchester train, scheduled for 11.39, was sitting on Platform 6, adjacent to a Guildford service which departed five minutes later. With what he hoped would be a successful tactic for shaking off any surveillance, Gaddis walked on to the Guildford train, sat on a fold-down chair beside the automatic doors, then moved quickly across the platform at 11.38 to join the Winchester service. He was not able to determine whether or not he had been followed, but the train moved off within thirty seconds and he sat back in his seat with the dawning realization that his life was about to take on a quality of evasion and trickery for which he was far from prepared.
An hour later he was trying Peter again from a phone box outside Winchester station. This time, he picked up. The sound of his voice felt like the first piece of good fortune Gaddis had experienced in weeks.
‘Peter? It’s Sam. I need to see our friend. Now.’
‘I’ll call you back.’
The line went dead. Gaddis was left standing in a phone booth which stank of piss and unwashed men. He opened the door to allow fresh air to funnel inside from the road and as he waited, leaning his body against the worn, age-frosted glass, he realized that he was no longer pursuing Crane for the money. This wasn’t about alimony any more, or tax bills or school fees. It was purely a question of survival; without the book in the public domain, he
