The Trinity Six (2011) Page 14

  Gaddis thought for a moment that Neame expected him to know the answer, but saw that he was going to continue speaking.

  ‘This was as far as I came with your friend, Miss Berg,’ he said. He caught Gaddis’s eye and appeared to be genuinely troubled by her loss. ‘She was trying to find out the answer to that question when she died.’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘She was your friend, Sam. You tell me.’

  There was a long silence. Gaddis felt that Neame was still holding something back.

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You look like you want to tell me something. Is it about Charlotte?’

  Neame looked up at the bar then down to his shaking, mottled hands. The whites of his eyes were glassy, free-floating, as if he was struggling to focus. ‘There is a woman in Moscow by the name of Ludmilla Tretiak. She is the widow of ATTILA’S third and final KGB handler, Fyodor Tretiak. I had suggested to Charlotte that she try to find her.’

  ‘And did she?’

  Neame looked back at the bar. ‘I have no idea. Ludmilla was a lead that Eddie had wanted to follow before he was forced underground. All I did was to warn Charlotte about her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Tretiak was murdered in St Petersburg in 1992.’

  ‘The same year that Eddie met his maker at St Mary’s.’

  ‘Precisely. That always struck me as too much of a coincidence. If Ludmilla suspects that her husband was killed by the KGB, she might want to talk to somebody about it. Which means that there are bound to be people watching her. Even now.’ Neame cautioned Gaddis with a resigned smile. ‘If you seek out her out, Sam, take the appropriate precautions. That’s all I’m saying. Make sure she isn’t observed talking to any nosey historians.’

  Chapter 20

  Gaddis was certain that he had seen Ludmilla Tretiak’s name in Charlotte’s files. Back in London, he called Paul, went round to the house in Hampstead and rummaged through her office. Sure enough, after searching for less than fifteen minutes, he found a listing for Tretiak under ‘T’ in one of her Moleskine notebooks, complete with an address and telephone number in Moscow. Later that evening, Paul remembered that Charlotte had been booked on a flight to Russia six days after her heart attack and called Gaddis to tell him. In her diary for that date, she had written the initials FT/LT and SU581, which turned out to be an Aeroflot flight number. Gaddis was convinced that the two women had arranged to meet, although there was no trace of an email correspondence between them on any of Charlotte’s accounts.

  It took him forty-eight hours to arrange a flight and emergency visa to Moscow via his usual travel agents in Pembridge Square; the publication of Tsars had clearly made no impact on Gaddis’s status at the Russian Embassy. He arrived at Sheremetyevo late on a Monday evening, endured the traditional chaos at passport control and found his suitcase in a corner of the baggage area fifty metres from Aeroflot’s advertised carousel. Gaddis had arranged for Victor, the driver that he always used in Moscow, to pick him up outside the airport and they shunted along a five-lane highway in permanent gridlock towards the Sovietsky Hotel, assaulted by smells of cigarettes and diesel.

  The following morning, after breakfasting on an omelette and two cups of metallic black coffee, he took the Metro three stops from Dynamo to Voykovskaya, emerging two blocks from Ludmilla Tretiak’s apartment. Whenever he was in the centre of Moscow, Gaddis felt that he had a memory for almost every building and street that he passed. But Voikovskaya was beyond the Garden Ring, a grey and sunless neighbourhood that he knew only by name. Tretiak’s apartment turned out to be on the ninth floor of a typical panel-built, twenty-storey, post-Soviet tower finished in three shades of beige. It was on a busy street characterized by erratically parked cars and kiosks selling pirated DVDs and cheap make-up. To ensure that Tretiak was in the city, Gaddis had called her number from a phone box in Shepherd’s Bush, pretending to be a telesales assistant offering cheap rates on wireless broadband. She had politely informed him that she did not use a computer and wished him a good day.

  Residents were coming in and out of the building all the time and Gaddis was able to enter without pressing the buzzer. He had decided to make his approach at lunchtime, when Tretiak was most likely to be at home, and had written a short note in Russian which he now passed under her door in a sealed envelope.

  Esteemed Ludmilla Tretiak

  Please excuse this method of contacting you. I am an historian from University College in London. I was also a friend of Charlotte Berg. I am aware of what happened to your husband in St Petersburg in 1992. For reasons that I am sure you will appreciate, I do not wish to put your safety at risk by telephoning you or even by introducing myself to you in person at your home.

  I have information about the events leading to your husband’s death. If you would like to discuss this matter further, I will be sitting in the branch of Coffee House opposite this building for the rest of the day. I am wearing a blue shirt and will have a copy of The Moscow Times on the table in front of me. Alternatively, if you would prefer to contact me by email, I have left an address at the bottom of this page.

  With my respect

  Dr Samuel Gaddis

  When he had pushed the envelope inside the apartment, Gaddis rang the bell twice, in quick succession, then took the lift back down to the ground floor. He wondered if he had sounded the right tone in the letter. Tretiak had been courteous and polite over the phone, but he could not be sure of her age and had perhaps pitched the letter too formally. Would she be prepared to risk a meeting with a man she neither knew nor could possibly trust? She might pass the letter directly into the hands of the FSB, with potentially disastrous consequences. But it was a risk that he had to take.

  As it transpired, he had no need to be concerned. Twenty minutes after sitting down towards the back of the Coffee House, Ludmilla Tretiak walked in, appeared to recognize Gaddis immediately and came towards his table. She was younger than he had imagined, perhaps no more than forty, and looked almost amused as she shook his outstretched hand and removed a bottle-green overcoat secured around her waist by a narrow leather belt.

  ‘I wish you good health,’ he said in Russian. ‘You are kind to come.’

  ‘How could I not? I was intrigued by your letter, Dr Gaddis.’

  She was dressed in designer jeans and a dark red blouse which fitted her pale, slender frame so precisely it might almost have been tailored. Gaddis was reminded of a certain type of married woman in the wealthier avenues of Kensington and Notting Hill, preserved in the dignity of early middle age, manicured and undernourished. He wondered if Ludmilla had remarried and searched her hands for a ring which wasn’t there. Had she had children with Tretiak? They would be teenagers by now, schooled in Moscow.

  ‘I apologize for all the subterfuge,’ he said. He used the word ‘uhlovka‘ for ‘subterfuge’ and Tretiak’s calm eyes flared for a split second as she acknowledged his proficiency in Russian.

  ‘You must have been warned about me,’ she replied.

  Was this the same woman that he had spoken to from the phone box in London? Her voice was very faint, but oddly playful. He tried to recall her end of the conversation, how she had pitched it, but his memory failed him.

  ‘I think you were supposed to meet Charlotte in Moscow last month,’ he said.

  ‘That is correct. I never heard from her again.’ Ludmilla took off a pair of leather gloves and set them on the table. Her fingers were witch-thin and bitten. ‘You said in your letter that you were a friend of hers. I hope that she is all right.’

  ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you that Charlotte died suddenly.’

  Ludmilla reacted in a way that reminded Gaddis of Holly’s indifference towards her late mother’s death. ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ she replied, without inflection.

  He craved a cigarette, but had made yet another private pact to quit. The Aeroflot flight had started it: smoking was banned on board, of course, but the u
pholstery of his seat had been so marinated in nicotine that he had considered lighting up in the toilet at 35,000 feet.

  ‘Did Charlotte mention why she wanted to talk to you?’

  ‘Of course.’ A waitress wearing a beige shirt and a long brown skirt approached them. Tretiak ordered a cup of tea with lemon. Gaddis was increasingly unnerved by her almost glacial sense of calm. ‘She told me that she was a reporter who knew about the circumstances leading to my husband’s death. In fact, she adopted almost exactly the same phrase that you used in your letter. “I know what happened to your husband in 1992.” Nothing more, nothing less. Only this.’

  Gaddis could see that he was expected to reply, to explain himself, but he was confused by Tretiak’s manner, which was at once confident and yet oddly disconnected.

  ‘Perhaps I should explain why I am here,’ he suggested.

  ‘Perhaps you should.’

  She suddenly smiled with a jarring, false rictus. Had she popped a pill before leaving her apartment? Sunk a couple of shots of vodka? Something had taken the edge off her anxiety and calmed her nerves. It was like talking to a doll.

  ‘I’m an academic in the Department of Eastern European and Slavonic Studies at UCL. Charlotte and I were friends. She was investigating a story relating to an NKVD operation in the United Kingdom before World War II which involved a graduate of Cambridge University named Edward Crane. When Charlotte died, I took on the story myself, with the idea of writing a book about it. My primary source of information is a man named Thomas Neame, a British citizen resident in England. It was Mr Neame who gave me your name.’

  ‘I have never heard of this man.’ Tretiak’s tea arrived in a tall glass and she stirred three packets of sugar into it, the tiny granules funnelling around the spoon. Gaddis watched them dissolve, hypnotized, and wondered how much he could risk revealing about ATTILA.

  ‘In the twilight of his career, Edward Crane was living in Berlin. Your husband was his final KGB handler.’

  Tretiak produced a look which suggested an almost complete indifference to her husband’s career.

  ‘I was not privy to Fyodor’s work,’ she replied. ‘We were married when I was very young. My husband was a rising star in the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.’ This was the formal, unabbreviated name for the KGB. ‘He was forty-seven when he died. I was just twenty-six. We had a small baby, my son, Alexey. We were left alone, to fend for ourselves. Everything is fine.’

  A faultline ran through her features, like a crack in the make-up of her personality. The effect of whatever medication she had taken had briefly shut down. Tretiak struggled to resume her customary air of intelligent hauteur and took a straight-backed sip of tea.

  ‘Would you have met any of your husband’s informants?’ Gaddis asked. He heard his own voice and felt like the worst kind of snoop. This woman was evidently unstable; he was no better than a tabloid hack door-stepping a grieving widow.

  ‘Of course not. Are you suggesting that agents would come to our apartment in Dresden? That I would cook for them while Fyodor talked business in the living room?’

  ‘Dresden? Why Dresden?’

  ‘Because that is where we lived, Doctor Gaddis.’ She was looking at him in the way that an aunt looks at a nephew of whom she is not particularly fond. ‘That is where we kept our apartment.’

  Gaddis was puzzled. He could only assume that Fyodor Tretiak had made trips from Dresden to Berlin whenever he had been required to meet Crane. It was a distance of - what? - a couple of hundred kilometres. He looked up to find that Tretiak’s widow was still staring at him and felt as if he was on the losing side of the conversation. Unless he could extract something useful in the next few minutes, he was facing the prospect of a wasted trip to Moscow.

  ‘Look,’ he said, trying to summon as much charm as he could muster. ‘I know from my limited understanding of intelligence work that wives can play a useful role in providing cover for their husbands. There was a famous example of an MI6 officer in Moscow whose wife passed information to a KGB colonel. He eventually defected to the West.’

  ‘Oh?’ Tretiak’s voice was like the song of a distant bird. ‘Who was that?’ She had no interest in the answer.

  ‘Never mind.’ Gaddis steeled himself. ‘Can I ask, please, how did your husband die?’

  Tretiak looked to one side, numbly surprised that this stranger from England had suddenly crossed a line into an area of her past which was still raw and private. Gaddis saw this and apologized for being crass.

  ‘It is all right,’ she said. ‘If I was not prepared to talk about this, I would not have come downstairs. I knew from your note that this would be the subject of our conversation. As I have already told you, I was intrigued.’

  This seemed hopeful. Gaddis encouraged her to tell the story.

  ‘It is quite simple. He was walking home one night to our apartment in St Petersburg when he was shot by three men.’

  ‘Three? Were they ever identified? Were they brought to trial?’

  She gave a resigned smile. She was resigned to everything. ‘Of course not. These men were gangsters. Mafia, you call them. It was simply an act of vengeance against a senior figure in the KGB.’

  According to Neame, Tretiak had been murdered by the KGB, yet his widow had the story the other way around. Gaddis suspected that she had been hoodwinked. In all probability, the KGB had simply hired a trio of St Petersburg thugs to do their dirty work for them. It was the most plausible thesis: the links between Russian intelligence and Russian organized crime were murky, to say the least.

  ‘Vengeance for what?’ he asked.

  ‘How would I know?’ Tretiak shrugged and stared outside at the traffic. ‘As I have told you, I was not privy to the secret nature of my husband’s work.’

  Gaddis looked down at his lukewarm tea and drank it, just to give himself something to do with his hands. Tretiak was gazing out of the window, like a teenage girl bored by her date.

  ‘It’s interesting,’ he said. ‘My understanding of what happened to your husband is quite different.’

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  Gaddis lowered his voice beneath the clatter and chat of the cafe. There was music playing on a broken stereo; it sounded as though the speakers were fizzing. ‘Look, I know that it’s hard for you. I know that you have no reason to trust me—’

  ‘Doctor Gaddis—’

  He spoke over her interruption.

  ‘But this is what I know. The source your husband was running had been working for Russian intelligence for almost fifty years. His KGB cryptonym was ATTILA. He was the greatest Western asset on the books at Moscow Centre for decades - but he was a double agent.’

  Tretiak’s mouth parted very slowly, strands of saliva appearing between her lips like a thin glue.

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘You cannot tell me who has levelled this accusation?’

  ‘Mrs Tretiak, what I am suggesting to you today is that the KGB wanted to cover up the existence of ATTILA. They wanted to save themselves the embarrassment of being deceived by the British Secret Intelligence Service. So they killed anybody who had anything to do with him. They murdered your husband to silence him.’

  ‘What was Crane’s position in Berlin?’ she asked. Lines had appeared in the light foundation around her eyes, further cracks in the mask. Gaddis recalled a detail from the obituary in The Times.

  ‘He was on the board of a German investment bank which had offices in Berlin.’

  She swore under her breath. For the first time, Gaddis caught a vapour of alcohol, sharp and full.

  ‘Why do you swear?’ he asked.

  ‘Why do I swear?’ She laughed so loudly that several customers turned to look at them. ‘It’s just that only recently I was told never to speak about this affair.’

  Gaddis wasn’t sure that he had heard her correctly. Then why had she responded so freely to his letter? Why had sh
e come down to the cafe?

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It was only last month, shortly after Berg had been in contact with me.’ Tretiak said ‘Berg’ as if she had no energy for the full name. ‘I received a visit from a government official.’

  Gaddis felt a threat in his gut, tugging at him like the grinding traffic outside.

  ‘What does that mean? Somebody from Belyi Dom came to see you?’

  Belyi Dom was the Russian translation of White House, the seat of government in Moscow. Tretiak nodded. She looked weary, almost bored. She might have been talking about a visit from a postman or a plumber. ‘This man told me that he was under instructions from Sergei Platov himself.’

  ‘Platov?’ Gaddis couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘I don’t follow, Mrs Tretiak. What would the President want with you? What did this man say?’

  ‘I was instructed not to talk to your friend.’

  Gaddis had the strange sensation of staring through her, into a dimension of secrets and obfuscations that he would never penetrate. He was about to ask how the Kremlin knew that Tretiak was planning to talk to Charlotte when he realized the answer to his own question: they had seen her emails. Christ, Charlotte had probably been bugged as well. That was why he had been unable to find any evidence of the Crane investigation on her computers; FSB technicians had wiped them clean. He watched Tretiak across the table, tiny and broken and shrugging her shoulders like a petulant school-girl. He wanted to shake her, to snap her out of her medicated reverie. A drizzle of rain appeared on the windows of the Coffee House as she managed a weak, consoling smile. Gaddis pressed her for more information but she remained vague and indifferent to details.

  ‘The official told me that I should not talk to anyone about Edward Crane. That if I was approached by any individual from the United Kingdom or America wishing to speak to me about an agent codenamed ATTILA, I was to inform them as a matter of urgency.’

  Gaddis pushed back from the table, an instinct for self-preservation. He did not feel that Tretiak had lured him into a trap - she was too stoned for that - but Moscow was now a threat to him, a city closing in. He looked around the cafe. Any one of the office workers, the students, the kissing couple in the corner, could be surveillance operatives.