surveillance. His plan was straightforward: to spend a few days in Spain with Min and then to go to Austria by train. Under the terms of the Schengen Agreement, it was possible to travel all the way to Vienna without displaying a passport; Gaddis assumed that this would make the task of tracking him considerably more complicated. He planned to arrive at the Radisson on the evening of Friday twenty-fourth, in time to mingle with the other guests. He would pretend to be a friend of the Drechsel family, discover the location of the wedding reception and perhaps accompany some of his new-found friends to the service the following day. That would bring him into direct contact with Robert Wilkinson.
As it transpired, SIS were short on manpower and had to task the observation of POLARBEAR in Barcelona to two local officials based at the British Consulate-General on Avenida Diagonal. Their surveillance reports, sent direct to Sir John Brennan in London, recorded a staggeringly mundane series of visits to local playgrounds, branches of VIPS restaurant, shivering swims in the October waters of Icaria Beach and father-and-daughter strolls along the Ramblas. Brennan was shown photographs of Min piggy-backing on her father’s shoulders, emerging from a cinema carrying an ice cream, and laughing as Gaddis told her a story on the Metro. There was evidence that POLARBEAR had been involved in a heated exchange with his ex-wife over tapas at a restaurant named Celler de la Ribera, but this was put down to the commonplace anxiety of a messy divorce. In every respect, POLARBEAR appeared to have abandoned any interest in pursuing Crane and Wilkinson.
Gaddis, of course, had done his bit to convince the boys and girls at GCHQ that he was a reformed character. He sent a Facebook message to Charlotte’s husband, Paul, for example, telling him that he had ‘not been able to make any headway at all’ with Charlotte’s book and had therefore decided to ‘set it to one side, at least for the time being’. He made deliberate decoy appointments by email, arranging to see a PhD student at UCL on the morning of Friday twenty-fourth. Using his regular mobile phone, he had also called Holly in London, telling her how much he missed her and inviting her to dinner at Quo Vadis on the night of Saturday twenty-fifth.
Brennan knew there was a possibility that POLARBEAR was laying an elaborate trap which would be sprung in Vienna, but he was more immediately concerned by the report Christopher Brooke had filed describing his encounter with Robert Wilkinson. Two passages, in particular, had alarmed him to the point of fury: EYES ONLY / ALERT C / AUS6HAW… Wilkinson referred to the incident which, in his view, necessitated his exile to New Zealand. Plainly he still holds the Office responsible for the attempt on his life and suggested — without corroborating evidence — that SIS either arranged the assassination attempt or, at best, could have done more to protect him in its aftermath. I must record that Mr Wilkinson was behaving throughout in a manner which I can only describe as aggressive and paranoid… Wilkinson brought our brief exchange to an end by threatening to pass Doctor Gaddis what he described as ‘chapter and verse on ATTILA’. Digital recording of the conversation states: ‘It’s time the whole story came out anyway. Christ, the British government would probably benefit [emphasis] if it did. Wouldn’t you like to see the back of that maniac [Platov]?’
Brennan felt that he had no choice; he had surely exhausted every other available option. Picking up the phone, he instructed his secretary to put him through to Maxim Kepitsa, Second Secretary at the Embassy of the Russian Federation and one of three declared FSB officers operating in London.
The call went through to Kepitsa’s private line.
‘Maxim? It’s John Brennan.’
‘Sir John! How delightful to hear from you.’
‘I wondered if you fancied joining me for a quiet lunch? Wanted to have a word with you about a man your government has been looking for since ’92. One of ours, in fact. Fellow by the name of Ulvert…’
Chapter 38
It took Gaddis almost two days to travel from Barcelona to Vienna. The first leg of the journey involved catching an overnight sleeper to Fribourg in Switzerland. He then made a short commuter connection to Zurich before catching a third, nine-hour train across the north face of the Alps. On the first night, in a bunk which he could ill afford, he had slept as deeply as he had done for many weeks; on the final leg of the journey, he had read Archangel from cover-to-cover, surviving on processed cheese sandwiches from the dining car and cups of increasingly vile black coffee. Every hour or so, he would move position on the train in an effort to ascertain whether or not he was being followed; on the rare occasions that the train stopped, he would shoulder his overnight bag, step down on to the platform, make his way towards the ticket inspectors, then climb back on board at the last minute.
As far as he was aware, his departure from Spain had gone unnoticed. He had taken three hours to get to the Estacio Sants in Barcelona, leaving Natasha’s apartment at dusk and taking a series of taxis, trains and buses in eccentric loops in the hope of shaking off any watchers. At the same time, he had left his regular mobile, fully charged and set to ‘Silent’, hidden underneath a filing cabinet in the sitting room of Natasha’s flat. He hoped that the signal given off by the phone would give the impression to GCHQ that he was still in Barcelona. He had then bought a new mobile at a Corte Ingles department store and placed the Tottenham Court Road SIM into the slot at the back.
If he was honest with himself, there had been something tawdry in all this, a sense of betraying Min by visiting her in Spain and then involving her, however indirectly, in the grisly business of deception. She was five now, still captivatingly innocent, yet when he had played with her on the swings near Natasha’s apartment or held her tiny hand in the flickering gloom of a deserted matinee cinema, he had felt the awful conflicting stain of his ambition, a sense that his determination to avenge Charlotte and to solve the riddle of Dresden was more powerful even than the security and wellbeing of his own child. Was that the case? Was he so stubborn, so desperate to succeed, that he would rob Min of her own father? That was the reality: he was putting his life at risk by pursuing Wilkinson. There was no other way of spinning it. And yet, he was surely too far in to stop now. Sooner or later, the Russians would work out his links to ATTILA. He would almost certainly be killed for what he already knew. On that basis, there was no point in obeying Tanya’s instructions.
Of course, he still had his doubts. There had been a moment on the sands at Icaria, for example, when Min had emerged from the freezing sea and Gaddis had held her thin, shaking body in a giant beach towel, thinking that there was nothing more important in the world than his precious, growing, giggling daughter. The times they would spend together in the future, however infrequent, would be infinitely more rewarding than any book about Edward Crane. But money intruded on everything. That same night, he had argued with Natasha over dinner at Celler de la Ribera, insisting that he was down to ‘thin air’ financially, only to hear her accuse him of ‘making false promises about Min’s future’ and ‘abandoning your daughter to the prospect of a third-rate Catalan education’.
So it was money, in the short term, which had convinced him to continue. Without funds to support Min, he was failing in his duty as a father. When he hid the mobile phone under the filing cabinet, for example, Gaddis had rationalized the act as a necessary subterfuge; he simply couldn’t write the book with SIS on his tail. Just a few minutes earlier, he had tucked Min up in bed and kissed her goodbye. He had then gone into the kitchen, shaken the feckless Nick by the hand, kissed a dry cheek proffered by Natasha and gone outside to hail a taxi.
There was an irony in the timing. If he had stayed just fifteen minutes longer, Gaddis might have seen the incoming call from ‘Josephine Warner’ in London. As it was, Tanya left a message on his voicemail: Sam, it’s me. I’m worried about something. I don’t know if you’re still in Barcelona or if you’ve come home, in which case I’m calling unnecessarily. But according to a colleague who’s been keeping me in the loop, there’s been a lot of chatter from our Russian sources. A lot of talk about Dominic Ulvert. There’s something else, too. The FSB know that there was a third gunman in Berlin. They’ve spoken to Doronin. He has almost certainly given them your description. As you know, I’ve been taken off the case but this has come from a reliable source. So just be careful. Don’t go to Vienna. Come home.
It was a touching message, as candid as it was risky to her career. Yet there was a further piece of information of which even Tanya Acocella was not aware.
That afternoon, disembarking from a BA flight out of Heathrow, a high-ranking Russian diplomat with suspected links to the FSB had calmly strolled through Vienna International Airport in the company of a Mr Karl Stieleke who, according to MI5, was a known associate of Nicolai Doronin. The diplomat’s name had flashed up as soon as he had presented his credentials to the authorities. Alexander Grek was in Austria.
