AT THE BEGINNING of September 2001, just after we lost track of Finn as he crossed from France into Switzerland after his meeting with Liakubsky, I was summoned to the Forest by General Kerchenko. The General told me I was to be put through two weeks of intensive retraining. It was routine stuff, he told me, and there was no explanation beyond that.
There was no sign of Yuri or Sasha, my case officers on Finn, and no explanation for that either. Instead, I was assigned Vladimir as my new case officer.
I noted a new deference towards me from Kerchenko. He himself also seemed to have been gently sidelined from Finn’s case and was acting merely as a messenger. I never saw him again.
Vladimir and I spent these two weeks barracked at the Forest. We worked sixteen-hour days and in the late evenings I was given new instructions in coding, separate from Vladimir. I knew I was being prepared to rendezvous with Finn again. My excitement was tempered by exhaustion, but mostly by caution. It was one thing for them to know that Finn loved me, but I knew it was necessary to establish that I had no such feelings for him.
Vladimir was very attentive towards me. Our long acquaintance made the time together as relaxed as it could be. One evening, we had a drink together in the compound after my coding instruction ended. It was nearly the end of the two-week training and we both felt good. I was happy that the time for meeting Finn was near. We sat in a log house in the forest, away from the others, and drank beers and talked and laughed about how my father had been so angry that I’d refused to marry Vladimir.
‘Might you have married me if your father hadn’t wanted you to?’ he asked me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’
He looked pleased.
‘Why haven’t you married?’ I asked him. ‘You should be married. You’re the marrying type.’
‘What does that mean!’ he protested, and then he laughed easily. ‘Anyway, you can talk.’
‘One day I want to settle down at Barvikha,’ I said, ‘with four children and a good Russian husband.’
‘You’d better get on with it, then,’ he said. ‘You’ll be over the hill.’
I punched him on the shoulder and caught him right on the nerve and he bent over in pain hugging his shoulder.
‘Thank God I didn’t marry you,’ he said through gritted teeth.
Later we were sitting very close on the porch, facing each other on two stools, elbows on our knees and each cradling a bottle of beer. I saw a gleam of tenderness and excitement in his eyes.
‘I’ve always liked you, Vladimir,’ I said.
I saw he couldn’t speak. Then he looked down, unable to hold my eyes.
‘You’re the only woman I’ve ever asked to marry me, that’s the truth, Anna,’ he said. ‘I never wanted to marry anyone else.’
I put my hand on his arm and he looked up.
‘Maybe…?’ he said, and he let the question hang in the air.
‘Let’s go inside,’ I replied.
For our remaining days at the Forest, we shared a bed and I told him that when this was all over, we should get married. I don’t know if this was the cruellest lie I’ve ever told in my life. I don’t know, because I don’t know what his motives were, whether he was genuine or whether he was one more hook they wanted to plant in me before I went to Finn. I trusted nobody. Why should I? We were in the Forest and I was being prepared to find the thing the Patriots most wanted to find, the enemy within. But for my purposes, it suited me for them to believe I was committed to Russia and that Vladimir was my personal route home.
On the last night at the Forest, lying in bed, I told Vladimir I loved him.
‘I’ve never told any man that before,’ I said.
I don’t know if we were both play-acting, or if it was just me. All I know is that, a few days before my rendezvous with Finn, I’d told another man I loved him, and I’d never told Finn that.
On a hot day at the end of September, I was summoned to Patrushev’s dacha, to the north of Moscow and across the lake from the dacha where Putin entertains world leaders. When I arrived in the car that Patrushev had sent, I saw that it was a meeting to be attended only by Patrushev, myself and Vladimir. I justified my great lie by the presence of Vladimir on that day. If he were so far on the inside, then how could I ever trust that his feelings for me were genuine either?
Patrushev made a stirring speech at the dacha about my importance to my country and the crucial role I had to play.
‘And we’ll keep an eye on your grandmother for you,’ he said. ‘I know how much you care for her.’
It was the usual threat. Despite my training, my job, my father and heritage, despite my visible attachment to Vladimir, they knew the only place my heart had always been, with Nana.
When it was time to leave, Patrushev stood and we toasted Russia. He took me by the shoulders and looked at me with his penetrating eyes.
‘Remember, Colonel,’ he warned me, ‘his only interest in you is to use you. All the rest is fake.’
Vladimir came to the airport with me and we–or was it just I?–made a great false show of hugging and kissing each other.