Charles Cumming - The Trinity Six

He took out his mobile. He dialled Tanya’s number because there was nowhere else to turn. She picked up almost immediately, her voice groggy and disorientated.

‘Hello?’

He was convinced that she had betrayed him, yet there was a strange kind of reassurance in hearing her voice.

‘Why did you do it, Tanya?’

‘Sam?’

‘Bob Wilkinson has been shot.’

‘ Shot? What?’ She sounded genuinely appalled, repeating what Gaddis had told her as if to absorb the full implications of what he was saying. ‘Where are you?’

A siren blasted in the near-distance, matched instantly by a second vehicle, tearing towards the Kleines Cafe.

‘Why did you do it?’ he asked her again. ‘Company orders?’

‘I don’t know why you think I had anything to do with this. Where are you? Tell me what’s going on.’

He could almost believe in her innocence. He wanted to believe in it. But there was no trust left between them. He said: ‘How am I supposed to know? I went to the bathroom, I left Wilkinson sitting at a table, next thing I know he’s been killed. You tell me what happened. You’re probably in fucking Vienna. You tell me how the hell they found out where he was.’

‘Sam. Listen to me.’ Tanya had composed herself. She was suddenly preternaturally calm. ‘This is what I was worried about. I thought you were still in Spain. What is this number you’re calling from? Is it a new mobile?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Hang up. Switch it off and take out the battery. Get at least a mile away from where you are, find a public phone and call me back. Do that.’

‘What?’

But she had already broken the connection. Gaddis spoke against the dead line, but Tanya was gone. He concealed himself in the recess of an apartment block entrance and stared at the screen. She was obviously worried that the Russians had a fix on his mobile. But was she genuinely trying to protect him, or just buying time in which to call John Brennan? Either way, he knew that he had no option other than to do as Tanya had instructed. He turned off the phone, his nail digging hard into the power switch, slid back the casing and removed the battery. He then placed the battery in his pocket, jogged down on to Schubertring and hailed a cab.

He fell into the back seat, unbalanced as a drunk, the driver staring at him in the rear-view mirror, waiting to be told where to go. Gaddis realized that he knew of no address, no destination in Vienna beyond the Goldene Spinne Hotel and the Ferris Wheel at the Prater. It was surely madness to go to the hotel and the Prater would be closed at this time of night. On an instinct, he blurted out ‘Hotel Sacher’ because it was the only other landmark in Vienna that he could think of. The driver made a noise at the base of his throat which was at once irritated and amused and within two short minutes Gaddis understood why: the Sacher was three blocks away. He could have walked there in under five minutes.

‘My mistake,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry,’ though there was no indication that the driver spoke any English. ‘I didn’t mean the Sacher. Can you take me to Sudbahnhof?’

The driver now turned in his seat, a middle-aged man at the end of a long shift who didn’t much feel like being messed around by a drunk British tourist. ‘Sudbahnhof?’ he said, as if Gaddis had asked him to drive to the moon. ‘No trains now.’

‘I’m meeting somebody,’ Gaddis replied and within an instant the driver had sighed and engaged first gear and swung out into the street, zipping through green lights towards the southern section of the city. They did not speak again. After a few minutes, Gaddis spotted a phone booth at the side of the road and instructed him to pull over.

‘ Halt, bitte.’

‘This not station,’ the driver muttered.

‘I don’t care. Pull over.’

He paid him, a ten-euro note thrust through the window and no time to wait for the change. The pavement was covered in a puddle of thin mud which splashed against his shoes as he walked towards the payphone. There were no people in sight. The phone was covered in stickers, the box scratched by coins and knives. He dialled Tanya’s mobile.

‘Sam?’

‘I’m in a phone booth.’

‘Listen to me very carefully. We don’t have long. If your number was compromised, mine is too. It’s not safe for you out there. We’re going to get you out of Austria. Exfiltration. If they came for Wilkinson, they will come for you.’

Gaddis, stunned, did not respond. Tanya mistook his silence for scepticism.

‘Think about it. The police will almost certainly get a good description of whoever was sitting with Wilkinson tonight. They’ll be looking for you. You can’t go back to your hotel. That would be suicide. You can’t rent a car. You can’t go to a train station or out to the airport. The last thing we need is Sam Gaddis being taken into the custody of the Austrian police.’

He wondered why Tanya had started to refer to him in the third person. Is that how spooks operated? They turned you into a concept, an ‘asset’, anything to convince themselves that they weren’t dealing with a human being.

‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘the last thing Sam Gaddis wants right now is to be taken into the custody of the Austrian police.’

‘Good. Then listen. Do you still have your regular mobile phone?’

‘No. I left it in Barcelona. Everything else is back at my hotel.’

‘Don’t, whatever you do, go back there.’ He could see the logic in that request, but a stubborn part of his nature was still convinced that he had time to go back to the hotel, to pack his belongings and to leave Vienna. ‘It’s the first place they’ll wait,’ she said. ‘Do you have your passport?’

‘Tanya, everything is in my room. I came out tonight with a notebook, a pen, a packet of cigarettes. No, I don’t have my passport, I don’t even have my wallet. I’ve got about eighty euros in cash and a Tube pass. That’s it.’

A frustrated silence. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she replied eventually. ‘I need to clear this line. We need to stop talking. Get away from wherever you are and try to go somewhere safe. Find a basement. Find a bar or a nightclub. Go somewhere where you can disappear until five o’clock.’

‘What happens at five o’clock?’

‘What happens is that you’ll turn on your mobile for as long as it takes me to send you the instructions for your exfiltration. You have to trust me, Sam. Don’t go back to your hotel. We can arrange to have your stuff picked up. Go to another part of the city. Lie low for three hours. At five o’clock, I will send the instructions. As soon as you’ve received them, switch off your phone and do everything that I have told you. Understood?’

He was at once perplexed and yet humbled by her willingness to help him.

‘Understood.’

Gaddis replaced the receiver. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. He was standing on a deserted street in a city that he did not know, wanted by the Austrian police, pursued by the Russian secret service, at the mercy of a British spy who had consistently lied to him about her identity. This is what his life had come to. He felt as if he had been on the run for months. He tried to remember what he had been doing at the exact same time the previous year and realized that he had been in Spain, in a seaside village about an hour north of Barcelona, trying to teach Min how to swim. He managed to smile briefly at the comparison but the memory did little to calm his frazzled nerves.

What to do now? Walking away from the phone booth, cutting down a side street, Gaddis tried to will within himself a determination not to fail. There was no time to feel sorry for himself, no time to panic. This was now a game of survival, a challenge which he had to face. Arriving at this conclusion did not feel like a particularly courageous act; it was simply that he had no choice.