greater loyalty towards Gaddis than she did towards her own side. Tanya knew that she was being lied to, and it irritated her intensely. ‘He’s obviously going to Berlin to meet him.’
‘You might try to keep an eye on him there,’ Brennan suggested.
‘It’s already organized.’ Tanya enjoyed the look of surprise on Brennan’s face. ‘I’m flying out tomorrow. There’ll be a surveillance team in place.’
It was a coup, no question. Brennan nodded approvingly. Tanya saw this and seized the opportunity to push for more information.
‘So what about Crane?’ she asked.
‘What about him?’
‘Where is he now? Where did he go to? What happened to him after the hospital?’
Brennan looked back towards the door. It was the question to which everybody wanted an answer.
‘Eddie lives near Winchester,’ he replied, knowing that it was only a matter of time before Tanya discovered the truth for herself. ‘I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to tell you before. After Paddington, we gave him a new identity. You’ll find him at the Meredith Nursing Home in Headbourne Worthy. He now goes by the name of Thomas Neame.’
Chapter 27
Gaddis had realized that there was no point in door-stepping Benedict Meisner. He recalled the email Meisner had written to Charlotte threatening legal action if she continued to allege that he had been involved in faking the death of Edward Crane. If Gaddis showed up in Berlin making the same accusation, Meisner would most likely slam the door in his face or, worse, call the police.
So he needed a more subtle plan of attack. He found a listing for Meisner’s surgery online and called the number from a public phone at UCL. The receptionist spoke perfect English and Gaddis asked if it would be possible to make an appointment for Friday afternoon.
‘Of course, sir. But we have only the limited opportunities tomorrow. I can offer you a consultation with the doctor at four o’clock. Is this suiting you?’
Gaddis took the appointment, gave the number of his hotel in Berlin, and wondered what he was going to use as a cover story. I’m having trouble sleeping, Doc. Do you have a cure for paranoia? The next morning, he set his alarm for five, drove up the M1, parked his Volkswagen in an offsite car park three miles from Luton Airport and caught the 8.35 easyJet to Berlin Schonefeld. A two-euro ticket on the 171 bus from the airport took him, at snail’s pace, through a grid of bright, well-tended suburbs peopled by German geriatrics. The bus, which stopped perhaps thirty or forty times en route, eventually came to a halt in Hermannplatz, where Gaddis caught the U-Bahn to Tiergarten. The Novotel was just across the street from the underground station, an upmarket executive hotel with a polished-stone lobby, tri-lingual receptionists and businessmen killing time between meetings in a low-lit bar. Ordinarily, Gaddis would have searched out a more idiosyncratic place to stay — a twelve-room, family-run hotel, a place with some character and charm — but on this occasion he was grateful for the soullessness of the Novotel, for his starched third-floor room and his flat-screen plasma TV showing films-on-demand and CNN. It made him feel reassuringly anonymous.
He had a couple of hours to kill until his appointment with Meisner and decided to go for a walk, winding along the quiet, narrow paths of the Tiergarten, then alongside the traffic on the Strasse des 17 Juni, past the Siegessaule and the memorial to Bismarck, then east in a plumb line to the Brandenburg Gate. Though he knew that there was no possibility he would ever be able to shake off whatever surveil-lance was thrown at him by the British or the Russians, Gaddis had made an effort to ascertain if he had been followed from London. At Luton, for example, he had made a mental note of his fellow passengers as they waited in the departure lounge, then scanned the 171 bus for matching faces, trying to work out if someone was tracking him into Berlin. At the Novotel, before embarking on his walk, he had left through the main entrance, loitered in the car park for ten seconds, then turned on his heels and returned to the lobby, in an effort to flush out a tail. Though he realized that these were amateur tricks, culled from movies and thrillers, at no point did he sense that he was being followed. Increasingly, in fact, as the hours and days went by, Gaddis began to believe that his interest in ATTILA had gone completely unnoticed.
All of which was a credit to the SIS watcher who had sat five rows behind him on the Easyjet, then followed the 171 bus to Hermannplatz in a hired Audi A4 which had been waiting for him at the airport. ‘Ralph’, who was in his mid-thirties and usually operated for MI5 in London, had also taken a room at the Novotel and now tailed POLARBEAR on foot as Gaddis made his way towards the Brandenburg Gate. Two hundred metres behind him, on a rented bicycle, Ralph was being backed up by a second pavement artist, known as ‘Katie’, who had flown out to Berlin with Tanya Acocella twenty-four hours earlier. The third member of the surveil-lance team, known as ‘Des’, was holding back in the Audi on Hofjagerallee, awaiting further instructions from Tanya. Tanya herself was installed in an SIS-rented apartment half a mile from the British Embassy on Wilhelmstrasse. She knew that POLARBEAR planned to meet Meisner, but did not yet know where the encounter would take place, nor for what time it had been scheduled.
Gaddis hadn’t been to Berlin since 1983, when he had been a student on a school trip peering over the Berlin Wall at East German border guards who stared back through war-issue binoculars, trying to put a gloss on their boredom. The span of time put Gaddis in a contemplative mood and for five long minutes he stood directly beneath the Brandenburg Gate, reflecting on how the city had changed in the past quarter of a century and pressing the palms of his hands against the stonework in a moment of sentimental contemplation which sent Ralph into paroxysms.
‘He’s doing something weird underneath the Gate,’ he told Tanya, speaking into a mobile phone. ‘Looks like he’s stretching his back. It might be a signal.’
‘Hold your position,’ Tanya replied. ‘Let’s see who shows up.’
But nobody showed up. POLARBEAR eventually walked towards the Reichstag, seemed to be put off by the length of the queue taking tourists inside to gape at Norman Foster’s dome, then retraced his steps and spent fifteen minutes on the south side of the Brandenburg Gate, strolling around the Holocaust Memorial.
‘Don’t lose him in there,’ Tanya warned Ralph, because she knew that the Memorial was a five-acre maze of granite blocks, some as high as fifteen feet, into which Gaddis could quickly disappear. She was now sure that he was using amateur trade-craft — hence his little platform jig at Waterloo Station — and it was certainly not beyond his capabilities to have arranged to meet Meisner in the centre of the Memorial, where they could not possibly be overheard.
Meanwhile, Katie had ridden her bike to the corner of Ebert and Hannah-Arendt Strasses, at the south- western edge of the Memorial, working on the assumption that POLAR-BEAR would eventually come out and make his way south towards Checkpoint Charlie.
‘I reckon he’s just doing the tourist thing,’ she said, a view with which Tanya and Ralph concurred when POLARBEAR’s head was observed poking out from a granite block twenty feet from the street. Moments later, Gaddis had emerged on to Hannah-Arendt, lit a cigarette, and walked east on to Friedrichstrasse, where he stood beside a postbox, looking around for a cab.
‘He’s obviously waiting for a taxi,’ Ralph duly announced, and Tanya ordered the Audi to within two hundred metres of his position while Ralph looked around for a cab of his own.
‘This is it,’ she said. ‘Don’t lose him.’
They didn’t. The Audi got there in three minutes and tailed POLARBEAR all the way to Prenzlauerberg, a fashionable quarter of former East Berlin where the city’s bohemian elite bought their vinyl records and drank their lattes. Ralph found a taxi two minutes after Gaddis but was called off after being reassured by Des that the ‘situation is very much under what I like to call control’. At 15.46 Gaddis was observed paying the driver of the cab and stepping out on to Schonhauser Allee.
‘He’s a block from Meisner’s office,’ Tanya declared, looking down at a map of Berlin. She had visited the location at nine o’clock the previous evening. ‘Let’s see if we can get his phone to work.’
POLARBEAR’s mobile was her only potential problem. Two days earlier, when Gaddis had left it unattended in his office at UCL, an SIS technician had succeeded in installing a piece of software which turned the phone into a
