‘What number is that?’
‘UCL.’
Gaddis was sick of deceiving her, sick of the effort of accumulating excuses. He tried to change the subject.
‘What’s the audition for?’
‘A play.’
But he did not listen to the answer. Instead, focused only on the tape, he said, ‘Will you have a chance to look for it today?’ and finally Holly’s patience ran out.
‘Sam, I’ve told you: I’ll look for the fucking tape. But it might help your cause a bit if you stopped acting like a paranoid schizophrenic and explained to me what the fuck is going on. Try asking a girl out for dinner. Try asking how I’ve been. It’s not difficult. Last time I checked, we were having a pretty good time together. Now every time I speak to you I feel like your fucking secretary.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ He wanted nothing more than to be alone with her, back in his old life, Min safe in Spain, students coming to his office at UCL. But it had all been ripped away from him.
‘It’s OK. I just hope you’re being honest with me.’ She paused before adding: ‘If there’s somebody else-’
Gaddis looked out at the passing traffic and shook his head. ‘I promise you it’s not that. It’s about my daught-’ He almost choked on the word, lost in the wretchedness of his situation.
‘Sam?’
‘Please don’t worry. Just find the tape, OK? Just try to find it. You have no idea how important it could be.’
Chapter 53
Gaddis went back to the mews house and locked the door. There was a laptop in Jeremy’s room and he found the name of Min’s nursery on Google. He called the number, using Tanya’s landline. To his relief, the headmistress reassured him, in broken English, that Min was ‘completely fine’ and would be going home ‘as usual, in a few minutes’. Gaddis hung up, lit a cigarette and went out into the garden. The small, enclosed space was overlooked by more than a dozen windows in five or six separate buildings, but he was certain that here, at least, he was safe from FSB eyes.
He took the crumpled note out of his pocket and looked at it again. THE SUM OF ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS WILL BE PAID INTO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT. THIS BUYS MORE THAN YOUR SILENCE.
Something about it didn’t ring true. If the Russians knew his home address, they would have killed him. Why bother with a crude blackmail? The FSB wanted anybody with any connection to Dresden out of the picture — Platov wasn’t interested in buying Gaddis’s silence. His political career, his reputation, his hold on power, was worth far more to him than?100,000. Besides, Tanya had insisted that the FSB knew nothing about Gaddis’s search for Edward Crane. So how come they knew about Barcelona? How come they could identify Natasha and Min? Only SIS had access to that information. The note could only have come from Brennan.
Back inside, he stared at the phone, willing Holly to ring, but knew that he would have to wait. Her audition would continue until five or six, she might then have dinner with friends and would not get home until late. It wasn’t even certain that she would bother looking for the tape once she did.
Gaddis knew that he had panicked in the aftermath of seeing the photographs. He realized that he had been a coward. He was entrusting his fate, and that of his daughter, to Holly, who could lose her life if she was caught in possession of the Platov evidence. He had to go to Tite Street himself. He would have to talk his way into Holly’s building and then somehow break into the basement.
He found a toolbox under the sink in Tanya’s kitchen. Inside it, there was a small steel saw, some screwdrivers and a hammer. He took them and put them in a plastic bag with no clear idea in his mind what he intended to do with them. He tried to compose himself, wondering if he was even making the right decision by leaving the safe house. But surely, in final analysis, he had no choice? He locked the house, went out on to Earls Court Road and waved down a cab.
In the taxi, he formed the basis of a plan. The storage cupboard was located in the basement of Holly’s building behind a door which was secured by padlock. Gaddis would use the metal saw to cut through the bolt. The basement could be accessed via an exterior staircase leading down from the street. Gaddis would need only to walk down this short flight of steps, to break the glass on the door and then to open it from the inside.
But he had never broken into a building in his life. He had seen private eyes picking locks on a thousand television shows, watched crime prevention advertisements in which hooded thieves entered properties via conveniently flimsy windows, but there was no reason to believe that he would be able to break in simply by smashing some glass and reaching for a door handle. After all, this was a basement in the heart of Chelsea — burglar country. At the very least, Holly’s residents’ association would have put steel bars on every door and window in the building.
Gaddis told the driver to pull up on Royal Hospital Road, fifty metres from the corner of Tite Street. He had concluded that his best tactic would be to behave as naturally as possible. From the point of view of a surveillance officer, there was nothing at all unusual in a man visiting his girlfriend at her flat.
A light was on in the first-floor window of Holly’s building. By a quick calculation, Gaddis worked out that the flat number was either 5 or 6; Holly was one storey higher in 7, with 8 on the opposite landing. He walked up the steps and pushed the buzzer for Flat 6.
No answer. He waited fifteen seconds, then pressed it again. Nothing. He tried the buzzer for 5. This time the owner answered almost immediately.
‘Yes?’
It was an elderly woman. Gaddis hoped that she knew Holly.
‘Delivery. Flowers for a Miss Levette.’
‘Holly? You want number seven,’ came the reply. ‘Nobody’s sent me flowers for years.’
‘There’s no answer on seven, I’m afraid, luv.’ Gaddis had switched his accent to delivery Cockney. ‘Any chance you could let me in?’
‘Well, I don’t-’
The door clicked open. He could not hear what the old lady had said. Had she triggered the lock or had somebody in Flat 6 eventually come to the intercom and buzzed him inside?
He called out ‘Thanks’ and stepped into the foyer. There was a staircase ahead of him and he immediately walked down towards the basement. There were two flats at the bottom of the stairs, on either side of a small landing. To reach the storage area, Gaddis had to go through a fire door, walk a few metres along a short corridor and then turn right into a narrow passage. He pushed a timer light and saw ten storage cupboards, one for each flat, on either side of the passage. There was a heavy padlock on ‘7’ and he took out the saw.
It was utterly quiet: no sound of a television or radio, no muffled conversations, no child crying out or laughing. He began to cut the bolt. The noise of this was so obtrusive that Gaddis was certain he would be overheard. The saw slipped on the metal; he wasn’t able to angle the blade so that it could grip on the bolt. He tried sawing with his left hand but that was also hopeless. He turned around and lifted the padlock as far from the door as it would allow, almost slicing through his index finger as he attacked it from the opposite side. He moved the blade more slowly this time, but still it slipped. He swore and then the timer light gave out. Gaddis released the padlock, walked back down the passage and pushed the switch. He reckoned he had no more than a minute before it would black-out again. This time, though, the saw made a narrow incision in the bolt; the blade warped repeatedly, but at least it was cutting.
He began to saw, steadily and methodically. The noise was still embarrassingly loud: anybody who overheard what he was doing would surely immediately conclude that he was cutting through a lock. The light gave out a second time. Gaddis switched it on again and, within a few seconds of returning, finally cut through the bolt. He opened the storage-cupboard door, found a light switch and cast his eyes over the piles of boxes, books, bin liners and hangers of dry cleaning left by Katya Levette. He would have to go through each box, one by one, until he found what he was looking for. He was convinced that he would find the tape, but it was the conviction of a man who has nothing left in which to believe.
