He started at the back first, on the basis that most of the files Holly had given to him had come from the front section of the cupboard. He made a small space for himself and ducked down to floor level, reaching for the boxes. It occurred to him, in the sweat of the cramped space, that Holly could come home at any moment, walk down to the basement and find him busily going through her mother’s private possessions with a sawn-off padlock at his feet. How was he going to explain that one?
A small box tucked in the far corner caught his eye. It had the name of a New Zealand wine maker printed along the side. Gaddis opened up the flaps and saw a stack of hardback books and manila envelopes stashed inside. He pulled out the books and held them open to the ground so that anything concealed inside them would drop out. Nothing did so, except a bookmark from a shop in Dunedin. He went for the envelopes instead. Gaddis had the vivid sensation that if he did not find the tape in the next thirty seconds, he would never find it at all.
A clear plastic folder. A DVD. Not a tape, not a cassette, but a DVD. Written in marker pen on the front of the disk were the words ‘P INTERVIEW 88 I’. Gaddis felt a rush of excitement, almost as if his skin was humming, but it was checked by the realization that this was not the master tape. Wilkinson must have made a copy on to DVD and kept the original in New Zealand. Or did MI6 have the master tape in a vault at Vauxhall Cross? At the same time, he experienced a profound fear that he was about to be disturbed. Had he come so close to his prize only to have it snatched away at the last minute? He had heard no sound in the basement, no voices on the stairs, only the noise of the occasional car or ped estrian passing on Tite Street. But he knew that he would have to move fast. He put the DVD into the inside pocket of his coat, switched off the store-room light, closed the door and looped the broken padlock over the handle to give an impression of security. Then he turned, walked back down the passage and opened the fire door leading back towards the stairs.
Holly was coming towards him, carrying a set of keys and a bag from Marks & Spencer.
‘ Sam? What are you doing here?’
‘No time to explain,’ he said, grabbing her arm and spinning her back up the stairs. ‘You have a DVD player in your flat, don’t you? We need to sit down and watch some TV.’
Chapter 54
Fifteen minutes earlier, Alexander Grek had pulled his blue, C–Class Mercedes into a vacant parking space on the corner of Tite Street and Royal Hospital Road and made a call on his mobile phone. Karl Stieleke had picked up and informed Grek that he was less than a quarter of a mile away, walking down King’s Road half a block behind Holly Levette. She was on her way back from an audition and had just gone into Marks & Spencer. Stieleke anticipated that she would be home within ten or fifteen minutes.
Three days earlier, the two men had broken into Holly’s apartment and conducted a two-hour search for any trace of the documents that had purportedly been sent to her late mother, Katya, by Robert Wilkinson. Grek had been acting on instructions from Maxim Kepitsa, who had himself been tipped off about the relationship between Wilkinson and Levette by Sir John Brennan. Grek and Stieleke had looked on every shelf, in every drawer, under every carpet and inside every cupboard of the apartment, but had found no sign of any material relating to Sergei Platov or the KGB. They had subsequently put a tap on Holly’s T-Mobile account and overheard a fraught telephone call from ‘Sam’, logged that afternoon at 1521 hours and traced to a phone box near Cromwell Road.
‘Sam’ had made reference to a ‘tape or cassette’ apparently stored in the basement of Holly’s building. It was the one place that Grek had not thought to look. He would now wait for Holly to search the basement and to obtain the tape, then follow her to the Donmar Warehouse. This would lead him to ‘Sam’, who was the final link in the chain. Grek suspected that Sam would turn out to be the same man who had shot Nicolai Doronin in Berlin. An eyewitness in Vienna had provided a description of ‘an Englishman in his early forties’ who had been sitting with Robert Wilkinson at the Kleines Cafe. Grek suspected that this was also ‘Sam’. Once he had been eliminated, Grek assumed that Kepitsa would consider the ATTILA case closed. He was not aware that Gaddis had entered Holly’s building less than an hour earlier.
Looking up, he saw Holly coming down Tite Street carrying a shopping bag full of M & S groceries. Stieleke was on the opposite side of the road, following her at a distance of about forty metres. Grek watched as Holly took out a set of house keys and walked into the lobby of the building. Stieleke moved past her, walked up to the Mercedes, opened the passenger door and stepped inside.
‘Will she get the tape?’ he asked.
‘She will get the tape.’
Chapter 55
‘Any chance of explaining to me what’s going on?’
Holly was trailing Gaddis as they walked up the stairs to her apartment. Two steps below the third-floor landing he suddenly pulled her towards him and moved his head against hers so that he could whisper into her ear without risk of being overheard.
‘Listen to me,’ he said. She was trying to wrestle free of him but he held her body tight against his own. ‘Don’t say anything. Don’t talk when we get into the flat. Go across the room, draw all the curtains like it’s a normal evening and switch on the radio. Put it on as loudly as possible without pissing off your neighbours. The disk I found in your basement is a recording of Sergei Platov attempting to defect to the West in 1988. It was filmed by Bob Wilkinson. Bob is dead. He was assassinated in Vienna. Your apartment may be under observation by MI6 and the Russian FSB. I am so sorry. Do not say anything when I let go of you.’
She pushed away from him, her eyes flooded by tears. ‘Bob?’ she mouthed and he suddenly saw an older woman’s face in Holly’s, the face of her mother, the face of Katya Levette. He pressed a finger against his mouth, shaking his head, imploring her not to speak. He looked across the landing at the door of her flat. He nodded to her, encouraging her to take out her keys and to open the door. Holly did so and crossed the room, switching on the radio as Gaddis had asked and drawing the curtains. Gaddis double-locked the door behind them, went to the television and saw the DVD player on the ground. There was a newspaper discarded on the sofa. He took a pen out of his jacket pocket and wrote on a corner of the front page: Do you have any blank DVDs?
Holly’s head was tilted to one side, as if evaluating Gaddis anew. He realized, sooner or later, that they would have to speak, so he whispered to her, not knowing who was listening or what, if anything, they could hear.
‘The disks you use to make your showreels,’ he said. ‘I need to make copies of this disk.’
She nodded. ‘Sure. I have loads.’
Her eyes were heavy and he said: ‘Don’t worry,’ reaching out and holding her hand. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’
‘I’m not worried,’ Holly said, and pulled her arm away.
Gaddis took the disk out of the plastic folder and inserted it into the DVD. Within a few seconds, he saw what he had dreamed of seeing. Sitting on a wooden chair in a well-lit German suburban living room was the young Sergei Platov. It was unmistakably the same man: Gaddis had seen dozens of photographs of the Russian president in his youth while researching Tsars. Platov was wearing a white shirt, a striped tie and his full lips glowed under the unforgiving glare of a bright overhead light. His carefully combed hair was parted on the left-hand side and he appeared calm and relaxed. There was a small glass of water in front of him. Gaddis heard a voice on the tape.
‘So, let’s start talking. Could you identify yourself, please?’
It was Wilkinson. The accent was unmistakable. As if to confirm this, Holly, who was looking over Gaddis’s shoulder at the screen, said: ‘That’s Bob’s voice’ and put her hand on the nape of Gaddis’s neck.
Platov began speaking in Russian. ‘My name is Sergei Spiridonovich Platov. I am a major in the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti. I live at Radeberger Strasse with my wife and daughter. I am one of eight KGB officers based in Dresden under the control of Colonel Anatoly Lubkov. I work on political intelligence and counter- intelligence.’
‘What is your official cover?’ Wilkinson asked. He had not appeared on camera and Gaddis suspected that he
