‘Possibly,’ Gaddis said, though he knew that Wilkinson’s assessment was completely correct.
‘Where are the files, by the way?’
‘At my house.’
‘Your house?’ Wilkinson’s sang froid briefly deserted him. ‘Under lock and key, I hope? In some sort of safe?’
It was the first hint of his willingness to co-operate. There was clearly something hidden in the files, something of value to him.
‘No safe would be big enough,’ Gaddis replied, trying to calm things down. ‘The boxes are just piled up in my sitting room.’
Wilkinson appeared to bury a rebuke. Instead, in a more controlled voice, he said: ‘Well, it’s unlikely that they’ll be there for very much longer.’
‘Why do you say that? I’ve had them for weeks. If SIS wanted to get hold of them, they’d have broken into my house long ago.’
Wilkinson shook his head. ‘The Office aren’t the ones you should be worrying about. Platov is the one who will want the files.’
‘Platov?’ Gaddis leaned forward. ‘With the greatest respect, there’s very little in the files that would be of any interest to anyone, even in academia. I found nothing about ATTILA, certainly nothing about Sergei Platov.’
‘That’s because you don’t know what you’re looking for.’
Gaddis felt a wave of excitement. Wilkinson looked as though he had finally made the decision to divulge what he knew.
‘So what am I looking for?’
Wilkinson paused. He stared again at the ice in his empty glass. Gaddis took it as a hint that he wanted another drink.
‘More whisky?’
‘Sure.’
This time it took just five minutes of battling through the crowd before he could return to the booth. The clutch of customers, including the American woman, who had been standing beside their table, were now pressed in even closer. They were using the near-side of Gaddis’s table as a place to rest their glasses and bottles of beer. Wilkinson appeared completely oblivious to their presence; he might as well have been sitting alone in a box at the opera.
‘You’re right,’ he said, passing the Yeltsin biography back across the table. ‘Cuttings job.’
Gaddis smiled. He set the drinks down and tried to restart the conversation.
‘You were saying…’
‘Saying what?’
‘That I wasn’t looking at the files in the right way. That I didn’t know what I was looking for.’
Wilkinson tipped his head back. ‘Oh yes.’ He seemed almost surprised by the topic of conversation. He tapped the photograph of Yeltsin, rapping it with the back of his hand. ‘You’ve written a biography of Platov, haven’t you?’
Gaddis drank. ‘It was more of a comparative study of Platov and Peter the Great, but-’
Wilkinson didn’t let him finish. ‘Tell me what you know about Platov’s career in the KGB.’
Was this another test? Gaddis would have to be careful. Wilkinson, the Head of Station in Berlin in the warmest years of the Cold War, would know far more about Platov’s brief engagement with the secret world than any historian at UCL.
‘I know that he was ambitious,’ he began. ‘I know that those ambitions were frustrated. Platov had a far higher estimation of his own abilities than his masters at the Lubyanka.’
‘That’s certainly true.’
‘He felt that he deserved one of the plum jobs in the West. Washington. Paris. London. Instead, he got Dresden, a backwater in East Germany. Which, I imagine, is where you first bumped into him.’
Wilkinson looked up. His heavy, pale face was still.
‘What makes you think I knew him?’
‘Oh, you knew him,’ Gaddis replied.
It was a risk, but it paid off. Wilkinson took a long, hard look at the crowd, grinned and turned to Gaddis. There were secrets coming.
‘Platov’s only trump card in East Germany was ATTILA,’ he began, ‘a moribund, seventy-year-old British spy sitting on the board of a bank in Berlin. He took a long, hard look at his life. He took a long, hard look at his career. He knew that the Soviet system was on its last legs and that Mother Russia had lost the Cold War.’
‘That’s not the official version.’
‘Of course it’s not.’ Wilkinson lowered his voice. Even with the noise of the bar, he was concerned that he might be overheard. ‘As far as all you journalists and academics are concerned, young Sergei was an unwavering patriot.’
‘So what’s the truth? What did he do out there? What happened to Platov that he would be prepared to murder countless innocent men and women in order to cover it up?’
‘You want to know?’ Wilkinson breathed in very deeply. His eyes were suddenly black in the darkness of the booth. ‘You want to know the reason why your friend was killed, the nurse, the doctor, Tretiak? You want to know why Eddie Crane had to become Thomas Neame, why Platov’s cronies planted a bomb under my car? Well, I’ll tell you.’ He was smiling now, because he was going to enjoy the look on Gaddis’s face when he told him. ‘The president of Russia, a man with eighty per cent approval ratings from his country-men, a patriot credited with restoring Russia’s economic might and sense of national pride, tried to defect to the West in 1988.’
Chapter 42
‘He what?’
Gaddis was dumbfounded. Of all the things he had been expecting to hear from Wilkinson, this was not it.
‘February of ’88. What we call a walk-in.’ Wilkinson was looking up at the blonde American. He obviously had an eye for a pretty girl. ‘Sergei Platov wanted to live in a nice big house in Surrey and he was prepared to give us whatever we wanted in order to get it.’
‘Christ. If that came out, he’d be finished. His political career would be in tatters.’
‘Precisely.’ It wasn’t as though Wilkinson was unaware of the implications. ‘The saviour of modern Russia — your latterday Peter the Great — exposed as a hypocrite who sold out his country in her hour of need and tried to flee to the West with a suitcase full of Russian secrets.’
‘And he came to you? You were the man he approached?’
Wilkinson nodded. It was plainly a source of considerable personal pride. The group of Americans who had been pressed up against the table had finished the last of their drinks and now began to file out of the cafe, the blonde going with them. Gaddis overheard one of them saying something about ‘finding a club that goes all night’.
‘I was in Berlin,’ Wilkinson continued. ‘A freezing bloody winter. Platov followed me into a cinema on Kantstrasse. There was a film playing to a half-empty house. The Searchers, if memory serves. I used to like going there in the evenings. My marriage had broken up. I was spending rather a lot of time on my own, you know?’ Gaddis nodded. He knew. He was at last able to reconcile the image of Wilkinson as a sensitive, romantic soul — the man revealed in the letter to Katya — with the brusque spook in front of him. ‘Suddenly, taking a seat right next to me, is a little man, taut and tough as a rat. Later, of course, we discovered that Comrade Platov was something of an expert in judo. I’d never seen him before. Too far down the food chain. But he hands me a piece of paper letting me know that he’s an officer in the KGB and wishes to defect to the West. I read it while he was sitting there, then looked straight at him and told him to fuck off.’
‘You what?’
‘I thought it was a bluff. One of their boring little games. But Sergei was insistent. “You must believe me,
