confront them. There were two members of the public walking on the pavement on the opposite side of the street. Would they dare to kill him in the presence of so many witnesses?
‘Sam!’
It was a woman’s voice, a scream in the night. It made no sense that somebody should know his name. Gaddis veered into the road.
The car came to an immediate halt. Gaddis was standing in front of it, the headlights blinding him. As he adjusted his gaze, squinting and shielding his eyes from the glare, he saw, to his utter consternation, that Josephine Warner was at the wheel.
‘Get in,’ Tanya said.
Chapter 29
‘What happened, Sam? Tell me.’
Gaddis was staring at her, pressed back into the front seat as Tanya accelerated along Reichenberger.
‘Why are you here? What’s going on?’
‘I am not who you think I am,’ she said. ‘Tell me what happened.’ She turned to look at him. ‘You have blood on your jacket. Where’s Meisner?’
‘Meisner is dead.’ He knew that she was MI6. It was obvious to him now: the deception at Kew; the dinner; the coincidence of her trip to Berlin. He wished that he had kept running. ‘Meisner was shot. I just killed a man. What the fuck is happening? Why are you here?’
‘My name is Tanya Acocella. I’m an officer with the Secret Intelligence Service. We’ve been following you because of your investigation into Edward Crane. I’m sorry, it was necessary for me to pretend to be somebody else. Please try to stay focused. What do you mean, you just killed a man?’
It was almost a relief to hear her confession. At least he knew, finally, what he was up against. Then Gaddis told her what had happened and, as he did so, heard the truth of his own life and career, annihilated by what he had done. ‘Somebody was in the apartment,’ he said. ‘A Russian. Maybe the same man who killed Charlotte. Maybe the same man who killed Calvin. You know who these people are. You know what I’m talking about?’
‘I know what you’re talking about.’ Tanya’s eyes were fixed on the road.
‘We went back to get cigarettes.’ Gaddis wanted to be inside the car and outside the car. He wanted to be protected by this woman and yet he wanted to be as far from her as possible. ‘A man was inside the front door. He must have been waiting for Meisner. We must have surprised him. I don’t know what he was doing there. He shot him as soon as he walked in.’
‘Are you carrying a gun?’
Tanya was making a fast left-hand turn through a green light on a deserted roundabout. She could not understand how POLARBEAR had got out alive.
‘Of course I’m not carrying a fucking gun. I forced the door and it fell out of his hand. He can’t have been expecting two people. It fell in front of me. I picked it up because there was nothing else I could do. I just turned and shot. I think I may have killed him.’
‘Jesus, Sam.’
He didn’t like the fact that she used his name so easily. He had been duped by Crane and now he had been duped by Josephine Warner, a woman that — Christ! — he had hoped to sweet-talk into bed twenty-four hours later.
‘Look,’ she said, turning to face him, ‘do you understand what has happened to you?’
Gaddis moved in his seat, aware that he was soaked in sweat. He looked at his jacket and saw spots of blood sprayed across the sleeve. He felt as though he was locked down, trapped, and experienced a vivid need to wrench the wheel from Tanya’s hands and to send the car piling into a newsstand at the side of the road.
‘I should go to the police,’ he said, trying to remain calm. ‘I need you to stop the car.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t do that.’ Wipers swept dirt from the windscreen. ‘If you go to the police, Crane will be exposed. We can’t allow that to happen. The German authorities would very quickly start to piece things together. Whoever you killed tonight was almost certainly working for the Platov government. I need to get you out of Berlin and back to London.’
Gaddis looked again at his sleeve, streetlights pulsing on the blood.
‘How am I supposed to get out of Berlin?’ he said. ‘There are fingerprints on the gun. I passed a girl on the stairs as we came in. I was seen at the cafe with Meisner. The police will have a description of me in less than twenty-four hours. The only thing I can do is tell them the truth of what happened. Why I was meeting Meisner, why I was in Berlin, why the Russians wanted him dead.’
‘You cannot do that.’
He was bewildered and yet he knew why she was obstructing him. It was an MI6 cover-up. Nobody could know about Crane, about ATTILA, about Dresden.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘Tell me why? What is so fucking important about a twenty-year-old secret that people have to die in order to stop it coming out? I saw a man’s brains tonight. I saw Meisner’s head completely blown away.’
‘We are simply trying to protect the relationship between London and Moscow,’ Tanya replied feebly. She knew that she was retreating into platitudes and could hear the disgust in Gaddis’s voice.
‘What? What does that mean, Josephi-’ He began to use her cover name and felt a fool. ‘What relationship between London and Moscow? There isn’t a relationship between London and Moscow. You loathe each other.’
Tanya tried again, although she knew that what Gaddis had said was close to the truth. ‘The German press can’t get hold of this story, nor can they know about your involvement with Crane.’
Gaddis shook his head.
‘What happened in Dresden?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Dresden. Something happened in Dresden. On ATTILA’s watch, in the twilight of his career. Something involving Platov and Robert Wilkinson. Tell me what it was.’
‘Sam, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ This was the truth. She thought of Brennan and wondered if Gaddis had stumbled on the very secret which the Chief himself was surely trying to conceal from her. ‘We need to concentrate on you at the moment. We need to get you out of Berlin. There’ll be all the time in the world to hear your concerns when we are back in London.’
‘My concerns,’ he repeated witheringly. Tanya’s mobile rang and he gazed out of the window as she picked up.
‘Yes?’ Gaddis could hear a male voice speaking on the line and assumed that it was the man who had been watching him at the cafe. ‘No, I’ve got him,’ she said. ‘Something happened. Yes. Everything’s fine. I can’t speak now. Get everyone back to the flat. I’ll contact you there.’
‘Friend of yours?’ he asked when she had hung up.
‘Friend of mine,’ she replied.
‘Tell him I liked his girlfriend’s coat.’
Tanya ran an amber light. ‘Look. What can you remember? Was there any CCTV in the apartment building? Did you see a camera?’
‘I wasn’t looking. We were just going upstairs for cigarettes. We left the cafe to get away from your friends.’
‘But you say you passed a girl on the stairs?’
‘A Goth. Yes.’
Tanya was piecing things together, trying to find a way of saving him. He was oddly grateful for the effort. ‘And the receptionist saw your face at the surgery today.’
‘Oh great,’ he exclaimed. ‘You were there as well?’
‘We were there.’
She did not have the heart to tell him about the bug in his phone.
The Audi was skirting the edge of a park. In a floodlit cage, men were playing five-a-side football. Gaddis
