‘I haven’t really had a proper chance to go through it all yet. I’ve been busy working on something else. I wondered if you knew what Katya was planning to do with the documents?’
‘I’m afraid I really wouldn’t know.’
It sounded like a lie but Gaddis had not expected a straight answer. Wilkinson was guilty of passing potentially sensitive intelligence information to a journalist. He had no means of knowing whether Gaddis was a bona fide historian or an agent provocateur hired by SIS to elicit a confession.
‘Perhaps we could meet in Vienna to discuss this?’ Gaddis suggested, a wild idea which was out of his mouth before he had thought through its implications.
‘Perhaps,’ Wilkinson replied, with a complete lack of conviction. Time was running out. If Gaddis wasn’t careful, the conversation would soon be brought to an abrupt end.
‘There was just one person in particular that I’m keen to talk to you about,’ he said.
‘Yes? And who’s that?’
‘Sergei Platov.’
Wilkinson produced a grunt of indifference. ‘But you told me that you’ve already written his biography. Why would you want to start all over again?’
‘It’s a different angle this time.’ Gaddis was wondering how best to play his trump card. ‘I’m interested in Platov’s relationship with three former intelligence officers from the Soviet era.’
‘Intelligence officers-’
‘Fyodor Tretiak was a high-ranking KGB resident in Dresden. Edward Crane was a British double agent for more than fifty years. The man who ran him from Berlin in the mid-1980s used the pseudonym Dominic Ulvert.’
Wilkinson’s shock came down the long-distance line as a whispered expletive.
‘You bloody idiot. Is this line secure?’
‘I think so-’
‘I will thank you not to contact me here again.’
Chapter 34
On the transcript of the conversation shown to Sir John Brennan the following morning, the abrupt climax of the discussion between POLARBEAR and Robert Wilkinson was rendered with the simple phrase: ‘CALL TERMINATED’.
Brennan, who had been led to believe that Gaddis had abandoned his interest in ATTILA, flew into a rage, calling a meeting with Tanya Acocella at which he admonished her for ‘failing to persuade this fucking academic’ that ‘if he so much as goes near Edward Crane ever again, we will throw him to the wolves in Moscow. I didn’t spend every waking hour of my fucking weekend on bended knee to the head of the BND asking him to turn a blind eye to Gaddis’s handiwork in Berlin just so that he could immediately pick up the phone and start chatting to Bob bloody Wilkinson.’
Tanya had attempted to interject, but Brennan wasn’t finished.
‘Does Gaddis have any fucking concept of what will happen to him if the Russians find out who he is? Does he know what’s at stake? Didn’t you make it plain to him after you landed at Gatwick? What did you talk about? House prices? Gastro pubs? Were you planning, Tanya, at any fucking stage, to do your job properly?’
She had been dismissed from Brennan’s office with a parting shot which had enraged her.
‘Here’s what you’ll do. Go back to CHESAPEAKE. Consider POLARBEAR closed for business. If you can’t cope with a simple problem like Sam Gaddis, I’ll have to take care of it myself.’
With Acocella in the lift, Brennan had immediately contacted the British Embassy in Canberra and instructed Christopher Brooke, the thirty-five-year-old Head of Station in Australia, to catch the next flight to New Zealand where he was to have ‘a quiet word with one of our former employees’. SIS activities out of Wellington had been wound down as part of a cost-cutting exercise, which meant that Brooke faced a seven-hour trip to Christchurch via Sydney, a further forty-five-minute flight from Christchurch to Dunedin, followed by a three-hour drive, in a rented Toyota Corolla, from Dunedin to Alexandra, which was in the heart of the South Island. Accounting for delays and transfers, the journey — from the moment he left his house in Canberra, to the moment he arrived in Alexandra — took just under fourteen hours and cost Brooke an explosive argument with his pregnant wife, who had been looking forward to a long-awaited five-day break on the Gold Coast. Brooke had fallen asleep more or less as soon as he had reached his hotel room, waking at dawn on Wednesday to discover that nobody had ever heard of Robert Wilkinson, nor of the property at Drybread.
‘We know most of the people round here, luv,’ said the manageress of the Dunstan House. ‘Drybread used to be a gold mine. Nobody’s lived out there for years.’
‘You sure you’ve got the right place, mate?’ asked a petrol pump attendant at a garage on the edge of Alexandra.
Brooke drove all morning. He saw three people in three hours, none of whom were able to give him directions. He scanned road maps but could not access the Internet in order to download images from Google Earth which might have provided him with a route to Drybread. He was passing through some of the most dramatic scenery he had ever witnessed, yet for the most part his Hertz Toyota was filled with the sound of a worn-out, irritated British spook swearing at the injustice of being posted to the arse end of the intelligence world and blaspheming venomously at the prospect of spending three days searching for a retired Cold War spy who, if the locals were to be believed, had never set foot in New Zealand.
Finally, Brooke drove back to Alexandra, went to the Public Library and found a reference to ‘Drybread’ in a historical guide to Central Otago, dated 1947. Wilkinson’s home had once been a gold-mining settlement and subsequently a farm. From the description in the guide, it was situated at the end of ‘Drybread Road’ in a gully at the base of the Dunstan Range, forty-five kilometres north-west of Alexandra.
He set out from the library. He passed through a dry, barren landscape — identified on the map as the Maniototo Plain — stopping for petrol and some food in Omakau, a settlement which boasted little more than a pub and a local store. At about four o’clock, he turned from the S85 highway on to an unsealed, single-track road flanked by rivers and streams which turned a deep, sky-matching blue in the late afternoon sun. Every few hundred metres he was obliged to stop and to open farm gates, the road becoming more rugged with every passing kilometre. He was concerned that the Toyota would puncture at any moment, leaving him stranded in the centre of a vast, underpopulated plain which would soon be cloaked in darkness. Just after six, however, approximately ten kilometres inland from the main road, he at last saw a battered sign for ‘Drybread’ and turned on to a narrow, potholed trail which ran across a cultivated plain towards a screen of jagged hills. The property was a small, two- storey homestead half a mile along the trail, nestled within a rectangle of willow trees. As he steered through the gate, Brooke spotted a figure in a prehistoric Barbour chopping wood on the eastern side of the property. It was beginning to spot with rain. He switched off the engine, stepped on to the drive and was about to raise a hand in greeting when he saw Robert Wilkinson walking towards him brandishing a cold-eyed stare and a double-barrelled shotgun.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
Brooke had his hands in the air within a split second.
‘Friendly! Friendly!’ he shouted, a hangover from three eventful years with the Service in Basra. ‘I’m with the Office. I’ve come from Canberra to talk to you.’
‘Who sent you?’ Wilkinson was holding at a distance of fifty metres, shouldering the gun and keeping it levelled at Brooke’s solar plexus.
‘Sir John Brennan. It’s about ATTILA. I have a message to convey to you.’
Wilkinson lowered the gun, broke the chamber and hooked it over his wrist.
‘Convey it,’ he said.
Brooke looked around. He had been warned that Wilkinson had ‘turned a bit native’, but had, at the very least, been expecting a cup of tea.
‘Out here?’
‘Out here,’ Wilkinson replied.
‘All right then.’ He reached into the back seat of the Toyota, retrieved a North Face parka, zipped it up
