‘The man whose death you orchestrated was called Edward Crane. He was a double agent for MI6. The Russians wanted him dead, so Brennan made them think that he had died of cancer.’
‘I had always wanted to know the answer to this question,’ Meisner replied quietly.
Gaddis pushed for more. ‘Do you remember anything at all about Crane? Did MI6 give you any indication what would happen to him? Were you ever asked to perform similar duties for British Intelligence at any point in the future?’
‘Of course not.’
‘What about ATTILA? Did anybody ever mention that name to you? Has anybody, apart from Charlotte Berg, ever spoken to you about what happened in 1992?’
‘You are the first person I have ever spoken to about it.’
Without seeing his eyes, Tanya could not tell if Meisner was lying, but the answer sounded truthful enough.
‘Then why do you think Somers was killed? Why do you think the Russians murdered Charlotte?’
Meisner emitted a strange, choked laugh. ‘Doctor Gaddis, it sounds to me as though these are questions to which you yourself should know the answer. I have nothing more. I have done nothing wrong. I was paid by MI6 to keep my mouth closed. I have kept my mouth closed. I signed your Official Secrets Act, just as once upon a time I signed a Hippocratic Oath. These things mean something to me. My reputation is important. If Benedict Meisner puts his name to something, if he makes a promise of any kind, then he keeps it. This is not a very modern concept, I grant you, but it is nevertheless essential to my own philosophy.’
There was another silence. The headphones had formed what felt like a pressure seal around Tanya’s ears and she briefly pulled them apart, feeling the sweat on her temples.
‘What about Thomas Neame?’ Gaddis asked. ‘Does that name mean anything to you?’
It was almost as if Tanya could see Meisner shaking his head. ‘I have never heard this name. Who is he please?’
She swore lightly under her breath and thought back to the Vauxhall Cross courtyard. Sooner or later, she had told Brennan, Gaddis is going to find out that Neame is the sixth man. Exactly, the Chief had said. And when he does, that’s precisely the point at which we step in. She had been furious at his deception, humiliated that her boss should have tasked her with tracking Gaddis’s movements without first supplying what was surely the most vital piece of information associated with the operation. Need to know, I’m afraid, he had told her, trying to soften the blow with one of his toadying smiles. Only a handful of people in the world know what happened to Edward Crane. Now you’re one of them.
Gaddis was doing something in his seat. Tanya could hear what sounded like a scratching of cloth and wondered if he was taking off his jacket. But then the take quality became even clearer and she realized that POLARBEAR had removed the mobile phone.
‘I have a photograph of him,’ he was saying. Tanya put two and two together as Gaddis began to click through the images in the phone’s gallery. ‘Have you seen this man before?’
She waited. There was nothing she could do to prevent what was about to happen. She heard Meisner lift out of his chair and then the noise of the phone being passed across the desk. The sound Meisner made when he saw the photograph of Neame in the pub was just what she had expected: a breath of disbelief.
‘But this is the man,’ he told Gaddis. ‘This is the man who was admitted to the hospital. The person in this photograph is not your Thomas Neame. The person in the photograph is Edward Crane.’
Chapter 28
It was only a small consolation to Gaddis that he had briefly suspected Neame and Crane of being the same man. Otherwise, he felt wretched and embarrassed, duped by a master liar. There was no memoir, he reflected. There was no memoir because Thomas Neame was the story. All that time, he had been talking to the sixth man but had been too dumb and too greedy to see it. The sensation was not dissimilar to the hollow feeling of being betrayed by a friend, or manipulated by a jealous colleague; he was humiliated, but he was also intensely angry. All his life, Gaddis had wanted to think the best of people, to take them at face value and to trust that human decency would win through. Of course, it was naive to think this way, to believe that the world had his best interests at heart. He should have seen what Crane was up to. Here was a man, like Philby, who had lived his entire adult life as an elaborate masquerade. Crane did not so much possess a personality as a series of masks; as each mask was removed, it was replaced by another. Neame was simply the latest in a long line of parallel lives, a role played as much for Crane’s personal amusement as for the practical purpose of disguising his real identity. In his youth, Crane had pretended to the British government that he was a loyal and dedicated servant of the Crown, yet all the while he had been passing secrets to the NKVD. He had then coolly switched allegiances, having long since convinced Moscow that his heart belonged to Mother Russia. The two positions were mirrors of each other, reflections of the same ideology. Edward Crane had no country. Edward Crane had only himself.
Looked at from this perspective, it made absolute sense to Gaddis that Crane should have chosen to tell the ATTILA story through a shell personality; it would have been contrary to his nature to expose his true self. A spy needed the protection of a cover story, a pseudonym. Besides, Crane would have enjoyed the intellectual challenge of duping Gaddis; doubtless he had derived enormous satisfaction from gulling a so-called leading academic. At what point had he been planning to come clean? Would he have gone to his grave as Thomas Neame, holding on to this last, elusive secret? Almost certainly. Why break the habit of a lifetime?
‘POLARBEAR looks well fucked off,’ said Des, following Gaddis on foot from Meisner’s surgery. Meisner had agreed to meet him at a cafe near his apartment in Kreuzberg at eight o’clock. ‘Whoever the fuck this Edward Crane is has put our boy in a very bad mood indeed.’
Two hundred metres away, Nicolai Doronin was also watching Meisner’s surgery, though he paid scant attention to Gaddis as he came out on to the street at half-past four, incorrectly assuming that the six-foot man with a corduroy jacket and leather satchel was a resident of one of the luxury apartments on the fourth or fifth floors. Nor did Doronin notice Des getting out of a blue-black Audi A4 on the corner of Schonhauser Allee in order to tail Gaddis to the U-Bahn at Eberswalder Strasse. Doronin’s interest lay solely in Benedict Meisner. He had been watching the doctor for forty-eight hours. He had established that he lived alone, had learned his daily routine, calculated his approximate physical strength, pondered his likely resistance to violent assault. On balance, Doronin felt that it would be wisest to pursue a similar strategy to that which had succeeded with Charlotte Berg. Just as Alexander Grek had broken into her office, he would access Meisner’s apartment, add 10mg of sodium fluoracetate to the bottle of water which Meisner kept by his bed, and return to London on the next scheduled flight from Tegel.
Doronin had not expected to carry out the plan until the following day, but having tailed Meisner back to his apartment on Reichenberger Strasse he had waited outside for an hour, only to see the doctor emerge at ten to eight wearing a fresh set of clothes and carrying a copy of Der Spiegel. It was obvious that he was going out for dinner. Sure enough, Doronin followed Meisner the length of Liegnitzer Strasse to his favourite cafe, which was a few hundred metres away on the corner of Paul-Lincke-Ufer. Meisner took an outdoor table, scanned the menu and ordered a glass of beer. This presented Doronin with a window of opportunity. He was keen to return to London so that he could spend at least some of the weekend with his young son. If he could pull off the Meisner operation tonight, he could be back at his flat in Kensington by lunchtime the next day.
So Doronin missed seeing the six-foot man with the corduroy jacket and the leather satchel getting out of a cab on Liegnitzer Strasse. Less than three minutes after he had turned and walked back in the direction of Meisner’s apartment, Sam Gaddis had pulled up, spotted Meisner and sat down at his table.
British Intelligence, on the other hand, were ahead of the game. Knowing that Meisner and Gaddis had arranged to meet at the cafe, Katie and Ralph had positioned themselves on the terrace, ordered two enormous bowls of onion soup, occasionally held hands for cover, and waited for POLARBEAR to show up. Tanya was sitting outside Meisner’s apartment, at the opposite end of the street, texting them from the front seat of the Audi. To her fury, POLARBEAR had left his mobile at the Novotel, which meant that audio coverage of his conversation with Meisner would now be impossible.
The cafe was popular with local families. Even at eight o’clock in the evening, young mothers were breast-
