It took Gaddis almost two days to travel from Barcelona to Vienna. The first leg of the journey involved catching an overnight sleeper to Fribourg in Switzerland. He then made a short commuter connection to Zurich before catching a third, nine-hour train across the north face of the Alps. On the first night, in a bunk which he could ill afford, he had slept as deeply as he had done for many weeks; on the final leg of the journey, he had read Archangel from cover-to-cover, surviving on processed cheese sandwiches from the dining car and cups of increasingly vile black coffee. Every hour or so, he would move position on the train in an effort to ascertain whether or not he was being followed; on the rare occasions that the train stopped, he would shoulder his overnight bag, step down on to the platform, make his way towards the ticket inspectors, then climb back on board at the last minute.
As far as he was aware, his departure from Spain had gone unnoticed. He had taken three hours to get to the Estacio Sants in Barcelona, leaving Natasha’s apartment at dusk and taking a series of taxis, trains and buses in eccentric loops in the hope of shaking off any watchers. At the same time, he had left his regular mobile, fully charged and set to ‘Silent’, hidden underneath a filing cabinet in the sitting room of Natasha’s flat. He hoped that the signal given off by the phone would give the impression to GCHQ that he was still in Barcelona. He had then bought a new mobile at a Corte Ingles department store and placed the Tottenham Court Road SIM into the slot at the back.
If he was honest with himself, there had been something tawdry in all this, a sense of betraying Min by visiting her in Spain and then involving her, however indirectly, in the grisly business of deception. She was five now, still captivatingly innocent, yet when he had played with her on the swings near Natasha’s apartment or held her tiny hand in the flickering gloom of a deserted matinee cinema, he had felt the awful conflicting stain of his ambition, a sense that his determination to avenge Charlotte and to solve the riddle of Dresden was more powerful even than the security and wellbeing of his own child. Was that the case? Was he so stubborn, so desperate to succeed, that he would rob Min of her own father? That was the reality: he was putting his life at risk by pursuing Wilkinson. There was no other way of spinning it. And yet, he was surely too far in to stop now. Sooner or later, the Russians would work out his links to ATTILA. He would almost certainly be killed for what he already knew. On that basis, there was no point in obeying Tanya’s instructions.
Of course, he still had his doubts. There had been a moment on the sands at Icaria, for example, when Min had emerged from the freezing sea and Gaddis had held her thin, shaking body in a giant beach towel, thinking that there was nothing more important in the world than his precious, growing, giggling daughter. The times they would spend together in the future, however infrequent, would be infinitely more rewarding than any book about Edward Crane. But money intruded on everything. That same night, he had argued with Natasha over dinner at Celler de la Ribera, insisting that he was down to ‘thin air’ financially, only to hear her accuse him of ‘making false promises about Min’s future’ and ‘abandoning your daughter to the prospect of a third-rate Catalan education’.
So it was money, in the short term, which had convinced him to continue. Without funds to support Min, he was failing in his duty as a father. When he hid the mobile phone under the filing cabinet, for example, Gaddis had rationalized the act as a necessary subterfuge; he simply couldn’t write the book with SIS on his tail. Just a few minutes earlier, he had tucked Min up in bed and kissed her goodbye. He had then gone into the kitchen, shaken the feckless Nick by the hand, kissed a dry cheek proffered by Natasha and gone outside to hail a taxi.
There was an irony in the timing. If he had stayed just fifteen minutes longer, Gaddis might have seen the incoming call from ‘Josephine Warner’ in London. As it was, Tanya left a message on his voicemail:
Sam, it’s me. I’m worried about something. I don’t know if you’re still in Barcelona or if you’ve come home, in which case I’m calling unnecessarily. But according to a colleague who’s been keeping me in the loop, there’s been a lot of chatter from our Russian sources. A lot of talk about Dominic Ulvert.
There’s something else, too. The FSB know that there was a third gunman in Berlin. They’ve spoken to Doronin. He has almost certainly given them your description. As you know, I’ve been taken off the case but this has come from a reliable source. So just be careful. Don’t go to Vienna. Come home.
It was a touching message, as candid as it was risky to her career. Yet there was a further piece of information of which even Tanya Acocella was not aware.
That afternoon, disembarking from a BA flight out of Heathrow, a high-ranking Russian diplomat with suspected links to the FSB had calmly strolled through Vienna International Airport in the company of a Mr Karl Stieleke who, according to MI5, was a known associate of Nicolai Doronin. The diplomat’s name had flashed up as soon as he had presented his credentials to the authorities. Alexander Grek was in Austria.