‘ATTILA is over,’ she said. ‘Crane will be moved from Winchester. Peter is going to lose his job. You won’t see either of them ever again.’
They were crawling around the M25, boxed in by lorries and bored men in vans. Gaddis thought of Peter pulling him around the Hampshire countryside with a Sean Connery satnav for company and felt a sting of guilt that he would now be out of a job. ‘What if Crane tries to contact me?’ he asked. He hadn’t thought through the question; he had merely wanted to provoke a reaction in Tanya. But the thought gave him a glimpse of an idea. Had MI6 seen the hushmails? Might he still be able to communicate with Crane via an encrypted message?
‘Crane won’t try to contact you,’ Tanya replied, but there was no conviction in her voice.
‘How can you be sure?’ Gaddis was beginning to believe that he could save the book. It was extraordinary to him, but in spite of everything that had happened, he was determined to finish what he had started. ‘You think a man like that isn’t capable of deceiving MI6?’
‘I think Edward Crane is capable of anything.’
‘Precisely.’ He looked out of the window. He needed to give the impression that his interest in ATTILA was over, to lie with the same finesse that Tanya had shown in deceiving him. ‘Anyway, you have nothing to worry about. I understand my situation. If he calls, I’ll ignore him. I’d rather wash my hands of the whole thing.’
‘You would?’
‘Sure. What am I going to do, run the risk of getting shot by the FSB?’ Tanya acknowledged the inevitability of Russian involvement with a brisk nod. ‘I understand the terms of our deal.’
He looked at her face, tiredness beginning to colour her eyes. It was strange, but it felt wrong to be deceiving her. The events in Berlin had forged a strange kind of bond between them.
‘I’ll go back to UCL,’ he said. ‘The book won’t get written. With any luck this will be the last time we ever see one another.’
Chapter 31
They dropped him at his house in Shepherd’s Bush and Gaddis found it just as he had left it a little more than a day earlier.
But, of course, it was no longer the same house. It was now a house with tapped phones, a house with bugged rooms, a house with a computer that spoke to faceless geeks at Vauxhall Cross and GCHQ. He opened the curtains in the sitting room and looked out at the cars parked on the street. There was a van directly opposite his front door, a van with blacked-out windows.
This is my future, he thought. This is the price of consorting with Edward Crane.
In an act of petty defiance, he walked outside, banged on the panelling of the van, said: ‘Make mine with two sugars,’ then went down to Uxbridge Road, entered a phone box and dialled Peter’s number. The connection was dead. No message or sound. Just a void at the other end of the line. Hungry and strung out, he took a Tube to UCL, dealt with his post and emails, then bought a new jacket at a store on Great Marlborough Street from a teenage shop assistant who popped bubbles of gum as she ran his credit card through the till.
He needed cash. He needed a new mobile phone. He needed to find a way of living his life which would restore some degree of privacy to his punctured existence. Nowadays everything left a trail: there would be number plate recognition on his car; alerts on his Oyster card; triggers every time he used a bank account. Gaddis would have to assume, at least in the first few weeks of his arrangement with Tanya, that MI6 would continue to watch him, to ensure that he did not break his word. His calls, his emails, his movements around London would all be monitored by an army of watchers whom he would never sense, never identify, never see.
He took out?900 from an ATM on Shaftesbury Avenue, the daily limit on his three accounts now that Nat West had wired him the proceeds of yet another?20,000 personal loan. He bought a monthly Travelcard. He paid cash in a shop on Tottenham Court Road for a Nokia mobile, registering a new SIM with the address of a flat in Kensal Rise which had been his temporary home following the split with Natasha. He planned to alternate between the phones, reserving the new number for any conversations or text messages relating to Crane. He would not give it out to any of his friends — not even to Natasha or Holly — for fear that their own phones were compromised.
Holly. He wanted the opportunity to check her story, to ask her why she had handed over her mother’s files. Was it, as she had insisted at the time, because Katya Levette had admired Charlotte’s reporting, or had there been another, more sinister motive? He simply did not believe Tanya’s claim that Holly was an innocent party.
He called her from the lobby of a vast Gothic hotel on Southampton Row. She was free for dinner, which again aroused his suspicion. Why would a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old actress not be doing something on a Saturday night? Why was Holly Levette always available to see him, even at short notice? It was as if she had been deliberately planted into his life as another pair of eyes, another layer of surveillance to add to Josephine Warner and the spooks of Berlin.
She showed up at his house at half-past eight. Gaddis had spent the early part of the evening carrying the KGB boxes downstairs and piling them at one end of his open-plan kitchen. Holly was wearing a pair of cork-soled platform shoes, a vintage dress from the 1940s and, to judge by the strap of her bra, a set of extremely expensive underwear. She did a double-take when she saw the files blocking the door to Gaddis’s garden and looked at him as if he had gone mad.
‘Spring cleaning?’
‘Research,’ he said. ‘They’re the boxes you gave me. Your mother’s files.’
Her reaction only fed his growing sense of suspicion. Her hands went up to her face, closed together as if in prayer, and she let out a stagey gasp of relief.
‘Thank God you’ve reminded me. I’ve had six of the bloody things clogging up my car for the last two weeks. Do you want them?’
It seemed an uncanny coincidence. ‘There are more files?’
‘It’s never ending. We missed about a dozen boxes in the basement when you came over the first time. Next time you stay, will you take them?’
He scanned her face for the lie. Why would she have waited more than a month to offload more information from her mother’s archive? Why now? Had Tanya spoken to her since they had landed at Gatwick? It felt like a plan to test the seriousness of his promise to jettison Crane.
‘I’ll help you carry them in,’ he said.
Holly was parked fifty metres from Gaddis’s front door. The van across the street had disappeared. She unlocked the boot of her car and passed him the first of six small shoeboxes, piling four of them on top of one another so that he was obliged to stagger back into the house with a wobbling column of cardboard secured under his chin.
‘What’s in these?’ he said when he had piled the boxes on the kitchen table.
‘No idea,’ Holly replied.
They managed to avoid the subject for the next two hours, talking instead about Gaddis’s trip to Berlin — ‘A fantastic city. Wish I could have stayed longer.’ — and an audition Holly had done for a part in a new television series — ‘Another bloody medical drama. Why don’t they just turn the BBC into a hospital?’ Towards eleven o’clock, full of wine and conversation, they went to bed. To deny any eavesdropping spooks the dubious pleasure of listening to his pillow talk, Gaddis went into his office, loaded iTunes and slid the volume control beyond halfway.
‘Are you all right?’ Holly asked as he came back into the bedroom. ‘Why are you putting music on?’
‘Thin walls,’ Gaddis replied.
She looked at him. ‘You’re being a bit weird tonight, Sam.’
‘Am I?’
‘Very. Is everything OK?’
‘Everything’s fine.’
He thought of Harold Wilson, of all people, a Prime Minister so convinced that MI5 were out to get him that he resorted to holding sensitive conversations in bathrooms with the taps running. If only he could tell Holly what was going on. If only he could come clean about Meisner, Somers, Charlotte and Crane. Then again, perhaps she already knew all about them. Perhaps he was sleeping with a Russian asset.
