Charles Cumming - The Trinity Six

‘Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you properly.’ Somehow, Gaddis remembered how to lie. ‘I was visiting a friend. Pleasure, not business.’

The guard seemed momentarily satisfied by the speed and concision of this reply but soon returned his gaze to the photograph. He looked up at Gaddis’s face. He looked back down at the photograph. He looked up again, obliging Gaddis to stand slightly straighter at the desk. Then, to Gaddis’s horror, he took out a magnifying glass and began studying the photograph, like a diamond dealer examining a stone for flaws. His right eye was pressed up against the passport, roaming across the page, checking every watermark, every cross-hatch, every pixel of the forgery. Gaddis switched the plastic bag from his left hand to his right and looked beyond the desk at the safety of the Departures area, trying to appear calm. It was like an oasis that he would never reach. At any moment he was expecting to be asked to step aside and to accompany the guard into an interrogation room.

‘Thank you, Mr Tait. Enjoy your flight.’

Gaddis managed not to snatch back the passport in wild relief. Moments later he was standing in an area reserved for smokers, drawing deeply on a cigarette and silently giving thanks for the brilliance of Tanya Acocella. He felt now that, unless he was profoundly unlucky, there was no threat to him, either from the airport police or from Russian surveillance.

Within two hours, the easyJet had landed at Gatwick. Gaddis had managed to close his eyes for twenty minutes during the flight, snatching some much-needed sleep at a window seat. Yet he felt no sense of joy as the plane landed in a drizzly England, no welcome glow of homecoming. If anything, it felt as though he was walking back into a trap from which he had just escaped. It was as though he knew that his problems had not come to an end; they were only now beginning.

Everything was fine until he was ready to pass through customs. He had collected his bag from the carousel, been effusively thanked by an elderly couple whom he had helped with their suitcases, and carried his own luggage towards the green channel at the far end of the hall. He was no more than ten feet from freedom when a customs officer stepped across his path, pointed at the leather case and indicated to Gaddis that he should move to one side.

‘Could I just take a look at that, please, sir?’

Gaddis felt a wretched sense of disappointment. As he moved towards a row of low, steel tables at the side of the hall, he was convinced he was the victim of a set-up. In years gone by, he had passed through Customs a dozen times with more than his fair share of Camels and Glenlivet; now his luck was up. He knew, in the way that you know of a sickness coming, that somebody had tampered with his bag. It was the only probable outcome. Ahead of him was a greyed-out mirror, smudged and scratched, on the other side of which he could imagine a line-up of grinning MI6 officers, Tanya among them, observing his final moments. Had she betrayed him, or did he look so strung-out that the officer had no choice but to question him? Gaddis put the leather case and the plastic bag on the counter. The customs officer was in his mid-forties and slightly overweight, with pale, indoor skin and a short-sleeved shirt which fitted him too loosely. He peered into the plastic bag, inspected the bar of Toblerone, picked up the copies of The Tipping Point and the Guardian Weekly, then replaced them. It was as though he was deliberately killing time until he went for the case.

‘Could you just open this up for me, please, sir?’

It was the politeness of the request that grated on Gaddis, the sense of procedure being followed, of sticking to the letter of the law. They make you open the bag yourself so that you can’t later accuse them of planting evidence. They make you open the bag yourself so that they can watch your hand shaking as it pulls on the zip. He felt a great rush of heat pulling up through his body and suspected that the customs guard was merely toying with him. Perhaps he should just come clean? Perhaps he should just tell him the whole story? Look, I’m being exfiltrated by MI6. There was a murder last night. I’m travelling on a fake passport. But there was still the small chance that it was all just a mistake. In a couple of minutes he could be sent on his way. Gaddis told himself that he fitted a profile; he was a dishevelled-looking middle-aged man, travelling alone, returning from Eastern Europe. Customs were obliged to stop him.

He unzipped the case. Inside, he could see his so-called possessions: the paperback books given to him by Eva in Hegyeshalom, the can of Austrian shaving foam, the tube of Colgate toothpaste. His dirty clothes — the clothes he had worn at the Kleines Cafe — had been placed alongside the jacket that he had bought in Great Marlborough Street. Viki had rolled it up into a ball.

The officer pulled at the jacket. As he lifted it free, Gaddis saw to his horror that something had fallen loose inside the case. A package of some kind. A small parcel.

The guard immediately picked it up and showed it to him. ‘What is this, sir?’

The heat again. The electric fear of capture. Gaddis stared at the package. It was about the size of two paperback books, wrapped in brown paper and secured in a thick skin of sellotape. There were no markings on it, no address, no stamps. He was about to deny ever having seen it before, but a stubborn refusal to kow-tow in the face of authority convinced him to lie. Before Gaddis knew what he was saying, the words were coming out of his mouth:

‘It’s just a present for somebody.’

‘A present?’

‘Yes.’

It was a ridiculous thing to have said. The package could have contained narcotics planted by Miklos or Viki. Gaddis had that feeling again of a second man inhabiting his body and speaking on his behalf. He could sense a constant flow of passengers passing behind him, staring at his back and condemning him with their eyes. He even heard a child say: ‘What’s that man done, Mummy?’ and wanted to turn around to proclaim his innocence.

‘What sort of present, sir?’

The officer’s question was put in a way that sounded almost disengaged, but Gaddis saw that he was studying his reaction carefully.

‘I’m not precisely sure, to be honest,’ he said. ‘A friend wrapped it up. A friend put it in there for me.’

‘You’ve never seen this package before?’

Eye contact now. Gaddis’s gaze flicked involuntarily to one side. He pulled it back and smiled, as if to assure the officer of his good character.

‘No. I’ve seen it. But I left Budapest in a bit of a hurry. A friend packed my bag.’

‘Somebody else has interfered with your luggage?’

Gaddis felt that his words were being twisted, that his lies were being unravelled even before he had uttered them. Why hadn’t he simply told the officer the truth? Then he remembered Miklos’s final words to him, the joke they had shared. If they ask you if anybody could have interfered with your bags, you know what to say. He felt sick to have been so easily duped.

‘Not interfered,’ he replied, hardly remembering what had been said. ‘We were just in a bit of a hurry.’

The officer had heard enough. He placed the package on the counter, searched through the rest of the case, then reached for a box-cutter in the pocket of his trousers.

‘Let’s open it up, shall we?’

He immediately began slicing through the loops of sellotape. It’s drugs, Gaddis thought, it can only be coke or pills. The officer was removing the brown wrapping paper. A sniffer dog picked up the scent and they waited to see who collected my bag.

‘So here we go,’ said the officer. Gaddis was staring at a small dark plastic box which the officer was holding in his hand. ‘Let’s have a look inside.’