feeding their children in the cool autumnal air, fresh-faced fathers bouncing toddlers on their knees. But service was slow. Gaddis had been sitting with Meisner for five minutes before the ageing hippie waitress deigned to show up and take his order for a cup of coffee.
‘You want a coffee?’ asked an incredulous Meisner. ‘At this time of night?’
Gaddis explained that it had been a long day — ‘I was up at five’ — and turned his attention to the menu. The cafe offered the sort of food he loathed: right-on stews, bean soups, tofu salads sprinkled with snow peas and pine nuts. He would have killed for a rib-eye steak.
‘What the hell’s a bio-bratwurst?’ he asked, but the doctor merely stared at him blankly through his tortoiseshell glasses. He had the distracted look of a man coming to terms with the indiscretions of his past. Gaddis scanned the food on the neighbouring tables. Surely there was something worth eating? Beside him, two undernourished Scandinavians were picking gingerly at a rocket salad. A string of lights was suspended over their table, hung between two chestnut trees. In the other direction, a young couple — British, by the look of their clothes — were holding hands and finishing off two large bowls of onion soup.
Gaddis froze.
He had seen the woman before: that afternoon, on the southern edge of the Holocaust Memorial, leaning on a bicycle and staring past him in the direction of the Reichstag. He had noticed her because she had been wearing a yellow overcoat identical to one that Holly had worn on a date to the cinema. He looked at the woman’s chair. Sure enough, the same coat was draped around the back of her seat.
Was he under surveillance? Gaddis’s coffee arrived and he was grateful for the distraction because it meant that he could fix his attention on the waitress. There was a small macaroon resting on the saucer and he swallowed it in an attempt to keep his behaviour natural.
‘Damn,’ Meisner said.
‘What?’
‘I forget my cigarettes.’ The doctor was checking his pockets, patting the inside of his jacket. ‘Would you mind waiting here while I go back to my apartment? It is just around the corner, just a few minutes away.’
Was this part of the surveillance operation, part of some pre-arranged plan? Was Meisner working in tandem with the British? Gaddis was about to offer him one of his own cigarettes when he realized that Meisner’s suggestion had presented him with the opportunity to leave the cafe.
‘Can I be honest?’ he said.
Meisner frowned. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Would you mind if we ate dinner somewhere else?’
‘Are you cold or something? They have blankets inside.’
‘No. It’s not the cold. I’d just rather we finished our drinks, fetched your cigarettes and went somewhere else to eat.’
Meisner suddenly saw what Gaddis was driving at. His face seemed to draw back on to its bones. When he lowered his voice, it was tight with nerves.
‘You think there is a possibility that-’
Gaddis interrupted him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think there is that distinct possibility.’
They stood up immediately. Gaddis drained his coffee in a single gulp, secured a ten-euro note under a sugar bowl and led Meisner off the terrace. They were fifty metres up Liegnitzer when he turned and saw the man who had been sitting with the woman in the yellow overcoat crossing the street behind them. He was speaking into a mobile phone.
‘I think POLARBEAR just made us,’ Ralph was telling Tanya. He was embarrassed, spitting with rage. ‘ Fuck it. He’s coming towards you. Looks like they’re heading to Meisner’s apartment.’
‘We will go into my home and think what to do,’ Meisner was muttering. Gaddis was concerned by how quickly his companion’s mood had deteriorated into outright panic. ‘Why did you bring these people to me? Everything was fine in Berlin until Doctor Sam Gaddis shows up.’
Gaddis turned again but could not see anybody following them. A part of him wanted to walk back to the cafe and to confront the couple at their table. Who were they? Who had sent them? He was certain that nobody had followed him from Shonefeld, but it would have been all too easy to trace his movements via his credit cards, or even by locking on to the signal emitted by his mobile phone. Yet he had accidentally left that at the Novotel. How had they found him?
At the north end of Liegnitzer, Meisner turned left into Reichenberger Strasse, a broad residential street, now in semi-darkness. At one point, Tanya was no more than fifteen feet away from them, concealed in the gloom of her parked Audi. She saw Meisner reach for his keys as Gaddis followed him into the building. They both looked tense. There had not been time to install audio/visual in Meisner’s apartment, so she knew that whatever took place between them, whatever they discussed, would remain secret.
The building was a restored nineteenth-century apartment block with two flats on each level. Halfway up the stairs they passed a teenage Goth wearing torn denim jeans and a black leather jacket. She ignored Meisner and kept her head bowed as she walked past Gaddis, clomping down to the lobby. On the second floor, Meisner placed his key in the lock, opened the door of his apartment, and stepped inside.
Something caused him to pause on the threshold and Gaddis bunched up behind him as they walked in. He looked up. A gun had appeared from behind the door, levelled at the left side of Meisner’s head. In the same instant, a shot was fired, a shot almost without noise, which sent a spume of brain tissue thumping into a gilt mirror on the right-hand side of the passage. Instinctively, Gaddis put all of his weight against the door and forced it open. Meisner had slumped to the ground beneath him. He felt someone blocking the door on the other side and pushed harder. A man swore in Russian and Gaddis saw the gun fall out into the corridor.
He should have run. That would have been the smart thing to do. He should have closed the door and sprinted downstairs. But Meisner’s body was blocking the way. Instead, terrified that the Russian would pick up the gun, Gaddis went forward into the apartment and scrambled across a polished wooden floor. He could sense Meisner’s assailant behind him, already clambering to his feet, but he had time to reach the gun and to turn, levelling the barrel at the man’s body. The Russian came towards him and Gaddis fired.
The bullet hit Nicolai Doronin on the right side of the chest, just below the shoulder blade. There was a gasp of pain as he slumped to the ground, staring wildly at Gaddis. His finger still on the trigger, Gaddis fired again, this time out of panic. The second shot seemed to go through the man’s neck and there was a sharp crack, as if a wall or a door jamb had been hit. Gaddis had not fired a pistol since he was seventeen years old, shooting at targets in a field in Scotland, and he was bewildered by the power, by the simplicity of what he had done. He glanced down at the barrel and saw that a silencer had been fitted. That was why there had been no noise. All he could hear was the sound of his own breathing, as fast as if he had sprinted up the stairs. He looked back towards the door. There was blood on the walls, blood in the passage. Meisner wasn’t moving. The Russian was moaning and turning away from him, bunched up in a foetal crouch near the wall.
He should have stayed. He realized that later. But in that moment, in the aftermath of what he had seen and done, Gaddis wanted to be out of the building, as far from the apartment as possible. He moved towards Meisner and saw, to his horror, that the entire left side of his head had been completely removed. He was looking into a man’s brain and it was no more than a few shards of tissue and bloodied hair and he was almost sick on the floor. He did not look at the Russian. He knew that he did not have the courage to shoot him again nor to check if he was still alive. Had he killed a man tonight? He should have rung the police. He should have alerted a neighbour. But instead Gaddis sprinted, almost flew, in three-step leaps down the stairs of the apartment building and out on to the road.
Tanya jerked forward in the Audi when she saw him coming out. She instantly knew that something was wrong. It was as if a wind had blasted Gaddis into the street. She saw him begin to jog along Reichenberger, apparently without direction or purpose. She switched on the engine, reversed into the street and followed him in a first-gear crawl.
Gaddis became aware of the Audi when he was about three hundred metres from Meisner’s apartment. It could only be the Russians, he thought, the accomplices of the man he had just shot. They were following him down the street and they meant to finish the job. His mind was scrambled. He was sick with fear, sick with guilt at what he had done. He wished that he had kept the gun that had felled the Russian, but realized that he had dropped it on to Meisner’s body as he stared at his wounds. He looked back. The Audi was fifty metres away. Why was it coming so slowly? Why were they not intent on killing him? He stopped and turned, suddenly overcome by a desire to
