The Trinity Six

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.’