THE PLANE LANDED at Scheremetyevo airport north of Moscow at five o’clock in the morning. It was the first time I’d been in Russia for four years.
At the foot of the steps two thugs from the Forest took me in a car, its blue light flashing with unnecessary urgency through to a side entrance of the airport. Within a few minutes of landing, we were on Moscow’s ring road.
They didn’t speak, even to one another; we just raced at high speed towards the centre of the city. We weren’t heading in the direction of Balashiha and the Forest, and I didn’t know where they were taking me–the Lubyanka, perhaps, or a Forest apartment, or somewhere else. The fear they were hoping to generate by the speed of the drive served only to wake me up and make me more alert.
After half an hour of this breakneck journey, the car pulled up outside the Savoy Hotel, just around the corner from the Lubyanka. One of the men opened the door for me, more like a policeman than a doorman, and they walked on either side as we entered the hotel and headed for the small downstairs bar.
The hotel was as I remembered it, a faded, scuffed reminder of its former empire glory before the 1917 Revolution, untouched by Moscow’s real-estate boom. Upstairs above the bar there was the tiny casino where Finn claimed to have won so much, so long ago, it seemed now.
The bar downstairs was empty apart from one man. I don’t know why I was surprised, but it was Vladimir. It put my mind at ease, a dangerous thing. But he was a welcome anticlimax compared to the reception I’d been expecting.
Vladimir kissed me four times in the formal Russian way and there was no attempt in here to remind me of our intimacy of four years before. He was now a colonel in the SVR, he said, but it seemed to me he had lost none of his old directness, simplicity, humanity even.
‘You and I have much in common,’ he said as he poured coffee. ‘They need people like us,’ he added, ‘if Russia is ever going to change.’
He was effusive, asking me genuinely innocent questions about my time away, what I liked about Western Europe, if I’d ever like to settle there for good.
He wanted to know about the Russian scene in the ski resorts and on the beaches over there. What was London like? And Geneva? And Paris? Meeting Vladimir was like coming home to a brother who has never left home. And for all I knew Vladimir had never been anywhere but Moscow and the Cape Verde Islands. I was aware, however, that the men with the car, whom he’d told peremptorily to wait outside, could in a moment take me elsewhere, to a place where the welcome wasn’t so warm.
Vladimir ordered breakfast for us both. At one point a hotel guest entered the bar and Vladimir sharply told the barman to tell him the bar was closed. On the television, screwed to the ceiling above the bar counter, a violent Russian gangster film played out, the Russian hotel equivalent of the wallpaper classical music in a Western hotel.
When breakfast and coffee had arrived, Vladimir switched the conversation to the reasons for my return.
‘They feel the British have stepped over the line,’ he said. ‘This death has made everyone very angry.’
I was relieved that they seemed to believe the British were still involved, rather than just Finn, but I felt uneasy that there would now be a change in their approach to Finn.
‘But you are truly the returning hero,’ he said. ‘I’m told Patrushev is pleased with the way things have gone.’
His use of the past tense–‘the way things have gone’–sent a shiver through me. Was it over? Was I not required any more, would I not be ordered to return to Finn?
‘It’s good to see you, Anna. I’ve missed you.’
I kissed him on the cheek.
‘Are you married yet?’ I said.
‘No.’ He grinned, and returned my kiss.
Vladimir said that I had an unscheduled meeting with Patrushev before I was to be debriefed at the Forest. The men in the car are FSB, he said, not SVR. Then I would be taken to the Forest and Vladimir would meet me there and we’d begin work together.
But first he had thoughtfully booked me a room in which to bathe and change. Half an hour later I rejoined him in the bar where we had another cup of coffee and talked about the quiet things, an apartment he was hoping to find with his newly elevated rank, and the latest movies coming out of Russia that never made it to the West. I was grateful to Vladimir. He had made what he called my homecoming more comfortable than I had imagined it would be.
As we left the bar and walked into the foyer, I picked up a copy of the day’s edition of Novaya Gazeta which was being delivered as we waited for my coat. On an inside page there was a story about a leading Swiss banker, brutally murdered in his home. The police, it said, wanted to interview a man called Robinson in connection with the murder of Clement Naider.
I was driven the hundred yards or so to the Lubyanka and was then escorted through its forbidding entrance.
Patrushev’s office was at the top of the building and, once again, the view from inside the KGB’s fortress made me forget where I was. The Kremlin’s towers and the onion domes of St Peter’s Church–the fairy tale of Russia’s greatness–shone in the early morning light.
Patrushev welcomed me in his customary grey suit and red tie, and he smiled his thin, purse-lipped smile that was more a recognition of another’s presence than friendliness. Yuri was back, no doubt with a new promotion and a more expensive watch. He glowered in a chair to the side of Patrushev’s desk.
‘Welcome home, Colonel,’ Patrushev said.
‘It’s been a long time,’ I replied.
‘Oh, four years is not so bad,’ Patrushev said, never taking his eyes off me. ‘You’re hoping to go to Barvikha tonight?’
‘If that’s possible,’ I replied.
‘We’ll see, we’ll see,’ he said, and I felt that Yuri sneered at my hopes.
Patrushev spoke about the reports I’d made in general terms, praising their ‘level-headedness’, and told me I was a valued officer and more would be needed ‘…if I was capable,’ as he put it. ‘You must be getting tired,’ he said.
I told him I was tired, but I would do whatever was required of me.
‘Of course. Finn hasn’t told you what we need,’ he stated, and looked at me, apparently for confirmation.
‘No, sir.’
‘For your sake, perhaps, for his own sake, and for the sake of Mikhail himself.’
‘That’s exactly what he tells me,’ I agreed.
‘He said that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’m getting too far inside his mind,’ Patrushev said. I didn’t follow his meaning.
‘Four years. He’s difficult to nail down, isn’t he?’ Patrushev said. I watched Yuri’s face and could imagine, in a picture of horror, Yuri actually nailing down Finn.
‘He may have seen Mikhail,’ I said. ‘On maybe one or two occasions. But I don’t know. They obviously have a way of communicating without meeting.’
‘You gave us the dates of these supposed meetings, but we haven’t been able to match them with any movements of senior figures here,’ he said.
‘I can’t be sure that he actually met Mikhail on those dates either,’ I said, ‘rather than simply picked up a communication from him.’
‘And his meetings with Adrian in London?’ Patrushev said. ‘Are there any more of them than you’ve reported?’
‘No. You have them all in my reports,’ I replied.
‘They meet often. Is this an attempt to make us believe that they are now just social friends? That Finn has left the Service?’
‘In my opinion, the job he does at the commercial investigation company in Mayfair is just cover,’ I said. ‘It’s very easy for him to meet with government officers behind the closed doors of this company, Adrian included. So, yes, I think Adrian hopes that we are picking up on their frequent lunches together in order to impress us that they are now just friends who meet in public from time to time and that Finn no longer works for MI6.’
Patrushev paused and watched me coldly.
‘He’s difficult to nail down in other ways, we’ve found,’ he said at last, ignoring my explanation. ‘There is the question of his childhood, for example,’ he went on and threw a closed file across the desk to me without suggesting I open it.
‘His story, the one he told you and the one we had from our other sources, does not seem to be correct. How well do you really know him, I wonder?’
I didn’t understand what he meant, but he clearly wanted me to listen to him rather than to look into the file.
‘You can look at it later. At your leisure,’ he added. ‘It seems Finn went to an English boarding school called Bedales, and was not brought up in a commune in Ireland after all. His parents lived in Berkshire, near London. His father was in the civil service, something to do with the coal industry, and his mother was a nurse. Two ordinary, middle-class parents, apparently. It’s all in the file. From this new evidence, Ireland seems to be a fiction. Is Finn a fantasist?’
This, at first, seemed a small point.
‘One of them’s fiction, evidently,’ I said. ‘Maybe this second version is his fiction,’ I continued cautiously. ‘His fiction made for him by MI6. I don’t think he’s a fantasist, no.’
‘But he was so convincing when he told you all about his Irish background out at Lake Baikal, wasn’t he? This was his story as told to you, the woman he loves.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Yes, he was convincing.’
‘If the story of his Irish upbringing isn’t true, I wonder what else he has convinced you of that isn’t true.’
He paused dismissively, as if this was a minor issue but I felt the walls were closing around me.
I reminded myself of what Finn had said years before, as we sailed on Bride of the Wind back to England. ‘They will do anything over the months, maybe years, to drive a wedge between us. That is what we must be most careful of.’
And these words of Finn’s were also exactly what he would say if he were lying to me.
I was dismissed after nearly an hour, but as it turned out only from Patrushev’s office.
Walking down two floors with Yuri in front of me, all I could think of was the file in my hands. This fiction, if it were fiction, was something so unimportant, so obscure, that I couldn’t understand why Finn would have lied about it, to me at any rate. So it must be the file that lied, I thought. But I found that I couldn’t keep that certainty in my head.
In an office below Patrushev’s, there were two men I hadn’t met, and Vladimir. But it was Yuri who was clearly in charge. The large desk was covered in documents illuminated by the one light in the room, a desk lamp that flooded the mess of paperwork. The four of us sat around the desk with Yuri in an old wooden swinging chair behind it. He lit a cigarette from one of several half-empty packets strewn across the desk and exhaled loudly and stared at me.
I placed the file of Finn’s supposed deceit on a mess of ash and screwed-up sweet wrappers- where it belonged, I thought.
Yuri continued staring at me. Then he looked away, affecting boredom.
He addressed one of the men I didn’t know. ‘Let’s start with the photographs,’ he said. The atmosphere was unfriendly, threatening even.
The man picked up a document case from under his chair and unzipped it. He withdrew a brown envelope, extracted a fistful of photographs from it, and gave them to Yuri. Yuri made a play of looking at them one by one, raising an eyebrow now and again, exhaling smoke, clicking his teeth. I wondered with a sinking feeling who the subjects of the pictures were. Finn and me, perhaps? I doubted it. The one thing we were careful of was our own, personal privacy. But this performance of Yuri’s was designed to unnerve.
He picked them out one by one and placed them in turn on the desk in front of me. The first photograph was a shot of Finn and me boarding a train.
‘Where’s that?’ Yuri said.
‘Bourg-en-Bresse in France,’ I said.
‘What were you doing there?’
‘Finn was meeting a contact. Then we changed trains for Geneva.’
‘Who was the contact?’
‘I didn’t meet him. Or her,’ I added.
It wasn’t the start I was hoping for and Yuri made a great play of allowing an expression of deep doubt in my story to settle on his face.
The pictures came in quick succession, sometimes pausing over one for further examination and extrapolation from me. They were external shots of Finn and me, travelling, until we came to a picture of Finn, Frank and me, sitting in a café in Luxembourg.
‘Who’s that?’ Yuri demanded, pointing at Frank.
‘His name’s Frank. He’s in my reports.’
‘Frank what?’ Yuri said, implying I was withholding information.
‘I don’t know. I was introduced to him as Frank. If you have a picture of him, presumably you know.’
‘What’s he doing?’ Yuri snapped, ignoring me.
‘He’s a private investigator. Specialising in banking, particularly in his home town in Luxembourg. He seems to be an old contact of Finn’s. More than that. A friend. Finn admires him a great deal. There’s a bond between them.’
There were two pictures of Willy, taken perhaps on a trip to Marseilles which the three of us had gone on, but these seemed to be the only pictures they had of us together. Then we came to pictures from the day before.
They weren’t taken at the Bären Inn, but at the railway station in Basle, Finn and I embracing, saying goodbye.
‘Two lovers,’ Yuri smirked.
‘That’s the idea,’ I said and he shot me an angry look.
‘It looks real enough to me,’ he said, and laid out the four shots of our parting on the desk.
‘Then I’m pleased,’ I replied.
‘Where was Finn going after he left you?’
‘He was taking a train north to Germany. To Frankfurt.’
‘What for?’
‘To meet a contact. A German. I’ve never met him and Finn has never mentioned his name.’
The more I tried to banish it, the more the name Dieter forced its way into my mind.
‘There’s quite a lot you don’t know, isn’t there, Colonel? After God knows how long with him.’
‘It’s a long game.’
‘It certainly is. The way you’re playing it.’
‘Those were my orders.’
‘You’re taking for ever to find simple facts.’
‘There are plenty of facts in my reports,’ I said, and I felt anger rising up in me. ‘We’ve learned a lot. Without me, there’d be no Exodi.’
‘What makes you think that’s so important?’
‘Because Finn does. That’s why I’m there, isn’t it? To find out what Finn’s doing. Exodi has been Finn’s main achievement.’
‘That you know of,’ Yuri added.
And then Yuri threw one of the few remaining pictures on the desk in front of my face, just as he’d done with the others.
‘Who’s that?’ he said.
I looked at the picture with the same care I’d looked at the others, but I knew when I saw it that I could not conceal the colour draining from my face. I felt the eyes of the four men in the room boring into me. I couldn’t change the feelings I felt rising up in my eyes and throat.
‘She’s called Karin,’ I said, trying to put some strength in my voice. ‘She’s a Swiss journalist.’
‘No,’ Yuri responded triumphantly. ‘She’s called Brigitte and she works for Swiss intelligence.’
The picture showed Finn and Karin, or Brigitte, boarding another train. Finn was wearing his old oiled coat, the one whose lining had concealed the camera. He carried in his hand a holdall he’d bought the day before we left the Bären Inn. He had his arm around Karin’s shoulder and they were laughing.
‘It was taken last night just before the train departed from Basle to Frankfurt,’ Yuri said, his eyes gleaming with vicious pleasure. ‘You were right about Frankfurt at least.’
I looked blankly at Finn with the Swiss girl.
Then Yuri moved relentlessly on to Clement Naider.
‘Finn shot Naider,’ he said bluntly. ‘When did Finn meet Naider? Finn met him and extracted the Dresden file, didn’t he?’
Something in his insinuating tone gave me the tiny hope I so desperately needed. They weren’t sure- they didn’t know- that Finn had met Naider at all. It was a glimpse into their doubt or ignorance of the fact and it was vital for my own story, my fiction. If they didn’t know for sure about the meeting between Finn and Naider, then I could keep to the story Finn and I had worked out. My feelings were numb from the photograph and that played into my hand. It had the opposite effect they’d no doubt hoped for.
I told them that Finn and I had been in Geneva- which they knew anyway from my reports. I said that I had no knowledge that he had met with Naider. That I would surely have known, even if he had kept it from me. I told them that Finn couldn’t have killed Naider, as he was with me outside Geneva, on the day when it had taken place.
‘Besides,’ I said. ‘This isn’t just Finn. The British and, for all I know, the Americans and the European agencies are crawling all over Exodi by now. They know how important Exodi is to their own security. Finn is just one individual. He’s not everywhere, all of the time.’
And then Yuri leaned in towards me.
‘He shot Naider, if you say he did,’ he said. ‘You are the witness.’
‘I see,’ I said.
Ever since I had read the newspaper reports I had guessed that the Forest was attempting to frame Finn for Naider’s murder. Naider’s murder removed a traitor and would now, perhaps, remove the unwelcome investigation of Finn’s into Exodi, and send a warning, as they believed, to British intelligence. They wanted to kill both birds with one stone.
The letter the Geneva police had found no doubt implicated ‘Robinson’, as it was intended to do. But one thing I hadn’t anticipated was that they might wish to use me to bear false witness in the framing of Finn. My final job for the Forest, perhaps.
Why didn’t they murder Finn now as they’d murdered Naider and assassinated countless others? Why the need to frame Finn so elaborately? I believe, for their own reasons, they were reluctant to assassinate a British citizen who they believed worked for MI6. That was a last resort.
After nearly eight hours in this room I was allowed to leave the Lubyanka. But they had sown their seeds of doubt and discontent well. Half consciously, I had left the file Patrushev had given me on Yuri’s desk. But it was restored to me before I was able to leave. I had this file, with its supposed evidence of Finn’s ‘real’ childhood, I had the image in my mind of Finn and Karin boarding the train for Frankfurt the night before, and I had Yuri’s unmistakable suggestion that, if the circumstances arose, I would make a fine witness in the framing of Finn for Naider’s murder.
What did I feel about these revelations of Finn’s childhood and the picture of him and Karin? In my head, I knew them to be untrue. I knew that the whole purpose of the day had been to undermine my trust in Finn. The file, which I hadn’t read, would surely be one of their forgeries. The photograph of Finn and Karin technically could be a forgery.
Yuri had gathered all the pictures up off the desk after showing me this one. He had not wanted me to dwell too long on it, perhaps, no matter how expert it was.
But to know a thing is not true is not necessarily to accept it. Knowledge is not always the final arbiter. Belief, acceptance, these are the things that knowledge relies upon–most of all, acceptance. The trick itself was crude, if it was a trick. Of course, the Forest used forgeries like this all the time. I did not believe that either Patrushev or Yuri would expect me to fall for these things. What they did expect–and what they got–were seeds of doubt that I could not completely banish.
No matter what I thought I knew, I could not forget the image of Finn and Karin, nor the possibility of Finn as a fantasist with a self-dramatising account of his childhood.
Vladimir accompanied me as we left the building and walked up the street, past the Bentley showrooms, and into a small cobbled street that led to Red Square. We found a café and ordered two coffees. Vladimir couldn’t persuade me to eat. Vladimir, the Forest’s velvet glove, I thought. He himself suggested the possibility of forgery in the café, so that I’d believe he was on my side. He was kind, attentive, eager to bend over backwards to understand my feelings.
And all I wanted was to get away from him. I went to pay for the coffees but he preceded me. Nothing was too much or too little for him when it came to taking care of me. He offered a car to take me to Barvikha, before our meetings and further debriefings the next day, but I declined. I wanted nothing he had to offer.
I walked alone down towards Red Square and wandered idly through the expensive shopping precinct that was once the GUM store reserved for the nomenklatura in my youth.
There were mostly young couples, newly enriched, looking in the windows and buying handbags, fur coats or jewellery.
The irony was that, in the Communist years, my family was able to shop here because we were the elite. Now only the new elite, the wealthy and corrupt, could afford to come here. My father, who had always existed happily on his salary, had lost his savings in the crash of ’98 and was reduced to eking out his meagre state pension.
I was looking aimlessly through a shop window at a mink coat when my phone rang. It was him.
‘Anna?’
My father sounded old, tired, and I felt an immediate sense of guilt that I had not contacted him once in four years. I’d had nothing to say to him. I spoke to my mother, very occasionally, and Nana often, even though she couldn’t hear most of what I said on the phone.
‘I know you’ve only just arrived,’ he said, ‘but I would like to see you when you have the time.’
This was not like my father, who’d always ordered me to do what he wanted. I detected no anger any more in his voice. I asked him where he was and he gave me an address of an apartment in a street on the far side of the Kremlin from where I was. I was immediately suspicious of his manner. Would he, too, turn out to be another agent of the Forest’s slow demolition of Finn? For the first time, I felt like an alien in my own country. I realised that there was no one in Russia, apart from Nana, whom I could trust. But I told him I would see him in half an hour.
His apartment was in a block reserved for loyal subjects of the Forest in their retirement. The block was close to the Kremlin and had recently been repossessed from one of Moscow’s rapacious property developers. They were all Heroes of Russia in this block. It was a Madame Tussaud’s of ageing intelligence officers, a gallery of rogues who’d served their country well, committed its crimes without question, and were honoured for the mayhem they had visited on different parts of the world.
They were all Soviets at heart who cursed the past for bringing their country to a dead end and cursed the present for its capitalist ‘American’ ways. Putin brought some sense to their confused and bitter world. He had brought their old service back from near annihilation and elevated it to supreme power. After the shame of the nineties, at last their deeds were respected again. They were the fathers of the new elite, myself included.
When I stepped out of the lift on my father’s floor, I saw his door was open and that he was waiting on the threshold. I was shocked at his appearance. He looked an old man, completely grey, and the lines caused by the anger and anxiety that had carried him through his career had deepened into leathery gullies and crevices that made him look like one of those bodies which are found in peat bogs from twenty thousand years ago.
He was wearing a grey suit, white shirt and red tie, as if he were still going about the State’s business, and his breath, when I let him brush my cheek with his lips, smelled of a long acquaintance with vodka and stale tobacco. Once upon a time, they made men like him president.
‘Anna, I’m glad you came.’
‘You’ve got yourself a nice place,’ I said. ‘Does Mother come here too?’
‘Sometimes, sometimes. She is…she stays away often. She still does her charity work.’
‘The Sakharov Foundation,’ I said and saw the old glitter of anger pass across his eyes.
‘Is that it?’ he said, but I knew he knew it perfectly well and that my mother’s work made him ashamed and furious.
‘Sit down. You’ll have some tea? Or some vodka?’
‘I only have a few minutes,’ I said. I had nothing to say to him, I realised.
‘I know, I know, you’re busy. You’re doing great work, I’m told. We’ll have vodka.’
He walked with surprising strength of purpose to an inlaid Iranian wooden cabinet I remembered from Damascus days. He took out two glasses and filled them both. I sat on the only chair and left him the sofa.
‘I have a fine view of the Kremlin from here,’ he said, handing me the glass. He raised his own. ‘To Russia!’ he said. He made the toast still standing, drained his glass without waiting for me to drink, and poured another from the bottle in the crook of his arm. I sipped the vodka.
‘You don’t drink to Russia?’
‘To Russia,’ I said and he smiled wolfishly.
He sat down across the low table from me and refilled both our glasses.
‘We are a great power again, Anna. Sure, some heads have to roll, but that is normal. You think the Americans and the British don’t do the same?’
I didn’t reply. I didn’t know why I had agreed to come but it certainly hadn’t been to talk about politics and violence. I felt as if I were in one of his drinking sessions of old and I saw a man who couldn’t express himself without pouring liquor down his throat. And even then, his mind only worked in some impersonal world of power. More power, more control; it was all he and those like him were capable of.
‘Just make sure you don’t lose your head in all of this,’ he said.
I felt suddenly exhausted, after nearly twenty-four hours without sleep. The day had already been filled with innuendo and insinuation, always with some veiled threat in the background.
‘To Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ I said and drank my glass in one to Putin.
He followed me, delighted to be drinking to Putin, and refilled the glasses again. Neither of us had anything to say to the other outside the sterile rigmarole of empty toasts.
I looked around the room out of embarrassment, the need to look anywhere but at him. I realised I hated him. I had hated him for a long time. I wanted to leave but my exhaustion and the vodka begged me to rest a while longer. I took in the tall lamp by the door with its pinkish fabric shade, the low table between us, some bookshelves empty but for a few photographs of men in uniform, a small corner table with curved legs in the shadow of the room, and then found myself staring to the left of him at the sofa on which he was sitting, leaning slightly forward. I felt him watching me. My unease was no longer controlled by the vodka in my stomach. It increased steadily into a thumping heartbeat, a hot flush, and then fear. The room began to take on the aspect of another room, another room much the same as this room of my father’s. It was the room that I had seen in the pictures of Clement Naider.
I don’t remember how I left him, or how I got out into the street. I had to vomit into a cardboard box beside a rubbish bin that overflowed with garbage before I was aware of very much. I remember an old woman laying her hand on my shoulder and clucking sympathetically, offering me a handkerchief and asking me if I was OK, if I needed a doctor.
I took a service car out to Barvikha. Nana was standing at the top of the three wooden steps that led on to the veranda of the dacha. She had watched the car’s lights as it swung on to the track that led to our home. We embraced as the car left, its driver telling me pointedly he would be back at six-thirty the following morning to pick me up.
Nana was much frailer now, nearly ninety years old, but still able to hobble about with a pronounced limp where her hip had given up. The first thing she did as we entered the dacha was to put her finger to her lips and point to the ceiling. The Forest had bugged the house again in time for my arrival. It was too dark to go outside and a driving rain had begun to fall.
We chatted about Finn as we made ourselves supper. Nana said, ‘Have you married each other?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘He hasn’t asked me.’
‘Then ask him,’ she said and we both laughed, me for the first time that day.
After supper, I crawled into bed and slept.