The Trinity Six Read Online Free PDF

bright red cover with the shadow of a sickle falling across it; his father asking to borrow it on a seaside holiday in Sussex.
    ‘To be honest, I haven’t thought about Hollis for a long time,’ he said. ‘Pincher’s allegations were never proved. Is that what you’re working on? Is that the scoop? Is there some kind of connection between Hollis and Norwood? She was associated with a KGB spy codenamed “HUNT” who was never identified. Was HUNT Hollis?’
    Charlotte laughed. She was enjoying tapping into Gaddis’s reserves of expertise.
    ‘Fuck Hollis,’ she said, with the same abrasive glee with which she had dismissed Norwood. Gaddis was bemused.
    ‘Why do you keep saying that?’
    ‘Because they were small potatoes. Bit-part players. Minnows compared to what I’ve stumbled on.’
    ‘Which is . . .?’ Paul asked.
    Charlotte finished off what must have been her ninth or tenth glass of wine. ‘What if I told you there was a sixth Cambridge spy who had never been unmasked? A contemporary of Burgess and Maclean, of Blunt, Philby and Cairncross, who is still alive today?’
    At first, Gaddis couldn’t untangle precisely what Charlotte was telling him. He, too, had drunk at least a bottle of Côtes du Rhône. Hollis a Cambridge spy? Norwood a sixth member of the Ring of Five? Surely she wasn’t working on a crackpot theory like that? But he was a guest in her house, enjoying her hospitality, so he kept his doubts to himself.
    ‘I’d tell you that you were sitting on a fortune.’
    ‘This isn’t about money , Sam.’ There was no admonishment in Charlotte’s tone, just the bluntness for which she was renowned. ‘This is about history . I’m talking about a legendary KGB spy, codenamed ATTILA, who matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. A man every bit as dangerous and as influential as Maclean and Philby. A mole at the heart of Britain’s political and intelligence infrastructure whose treason has been deliberately covered up by the British government for more than fifty years.’
    ‘Jesus.’ Gaddis tried to hide his scepticism. It surely wasn’t plausible that a sixth member of the Trinity ring had escaped detection. Every spook and academic and journalist with the slightest interest in the secret world had been hunting the sixth man for decades. Any Soviet defector, at any point after 1945, could have blown ATTILA’s cover at the drop of a hat. At the very least, Cairncross or Blunt would have given him up at the time of their exposure.
    ‘Where are you getting your information?’ he asked. ‘Why was there no mention of ATTILA in Mitrokhin?’
    Vasili Mitrokhin was a major in the KGB who passed detailed accounts of Russian intelligence operations to MI6 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The documents were published in the UK in 1992.
    ‘Everybody thinks the entire history of Soviet espionage was contained in Mitrokhin.’ Charlotte lit a cigarette and looked utterly content. ‘But there was a ton of stuff he didn’t get his hands on. Including this.’
    Paul put his knife and fork together. Charlotte’s husband was a tall, patient man, impassive to the point of diffidence. A successful City financier – hence the seven-figure, five-bedroom house in Hampstead – he loved Charlotte not least because she allowed him to blend into the background, to maintain the privacy he had worked so hard to protect. He was so inscrutable that Sam could never work out whether Paul viewed him as a threat to their marriage or as a valued friend. It was almost a surprise when he joined the fray, saying:
    ‘Come on, who’s your source?’
    Charlotte leaned forward into an effectively conspiratorial cloud of cigarette smoke and looked at both men in turn. Her husband was the only person she could entirely trust with the information. Gaddis was a loyal friend, of course, a man of tact and discretion, but he also possessed a streak of mischievousness which made sharing a secret like this