by Alex Dryden
We left the restaurant and Patrushev waved away the staff who offered him help. We walked out into a dark, moonless night and strolled across the car park which was the size of a parade ground.
‘Do you know why MI6 has kept Finn in Moscow for so long?’ Patrushev asked when we were far away from the buildings.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘I believe you don’t,’ he said.
I returned his stare.
‘We have a great interest in Finn, Anna. It is a vital interest for Russia.’
‘I guessed so. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.’
‘You’re smarter than your colleagues, if I may say so,’ Patrushev said and took my arm.
‘I’m going to confide in you, Anna, because it’s important for your work, for us, for your country. You understand?’
‘This is not even for the others’ ears,’ I said.
‘Exactly. Confidential isn’t a strong enough word,’ Patrushev said. ‘This is to be buried at the bottom of the deepest ocean as far as you’re concerned.’
‘I understand.’
‘We believe Finn has overstayed his welcome here for so many years for a very good reason. He has a source. An unusually important source, and one who will communicate only with him. We believe this source is so senior, either in the FSB or the SVR but probably the latter, that his identity can be restricted to a handful of perhaps ten people. We want to know who that source is, Anna.’
I didn’t answer. I was thinking wildly of Finn and his amiable, frivolous, carefree front and the huge secret Patrushev believed it all concealed.
‘You’re a clever woman, Anna. You’ve made him fall in love with you,’ Patrushev said.
I felt sick at that. I couldn’t speak.
‘And so you’re now in the perfect position,’ he said. ‘We want you to help us to make Russia strong again.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘There is a bright and modern future for our country. But there’s someone very close to our hearts who doesn’t want that. We want the identity of the enemy, Anna. You are in the right place. You have the right background. And you are a rising star yourself in this new Russia. You can make history, perhaps, if you find this insider who will do anything, it seems, to damage Russia. That’s your job, and that alone. Find the identity of this traitor who has talked about the Plan.’
As I drove along the dark road to Barvikha that night, I felt completely joined to Finn, completely connected. He’d known we’d be reunited, and now I knew why. I was to be assigned to watch him again, sometime and somewhere else. And, once more, I knew that this future conjunction enabled me to postpone a decision to leave Russia for ever.
12
AS I SIT now in the vault at Tegernsee, I recall how well Finn guarded his great secret from me while he remained in Moscow. Had he been about to tell me on those two occasions, by the pond on New Year’s Eve and at the Baltschug Hotel? He had come close. But he drew back both times. And I know now that it was for my sake that he had kept his secret to himself. I doubt otherwise whether I would ever have been able to act as ignorant in front of Patrushev as I had.
Down in the vault below the little pink house, the oil in the burner is low and I reach for a can, fill the container, and the burner picks up. I stop and listen. A footstep upstairs? People passing by in the cobbled street outside? How much time have I got? Where is Finn?
I’m certain that I’m the only person to have read his record of that time. I can see, on this winter’s night six years later, that everything here in the vault in Tegernsee is as Finn left it. It is here for a purpose and that purpose is to hide what happened, not just from us at the Forest, but from his own people in London too. He didn’t trust them not to destroy the evidence.
I am reading an unread, virgin script and it feels appropriate to be reading it in a place that has been the refuge for illegal bibles, religious tracts, secret meetings and wounded fugitives from the religious wars that ravaged Europe five centuries ago. I am in a place of secrets.
Finn chose his hideaway at Tegernsee well. He found a small, pale pink wood-shuttered house, with a sharp-leaning roof against the snow. But evidently the most important reason he chose it was for the vault below. The entrance to the vault was behind a mantelpiece with a false gas log fire beneath it, its copper pipes unconnected. The whole mantelpiece and fire slid sideways. The entrance to the vault in the space behind the fire was protected by steel doors.
It was a modernised version of an old religious hideaway that existed beneath the site of the sixteenth-century house and, in recent times, someone had seen fit to improve on it. Finn had leased the building in the name of an offshore, brass-plate company in the British Virgin Islands.
But he also chose Tegernsee, the town itself, with his typical eye for the dramatic. Two streets away, the old bull-necked Stasi spy Anatoly Schmidtke lives out his retirement in the upstairs apartment of a wooden chalet, next door to a lingerie shop. The cameras of the BND, the German security service that made their deal with him and brushed over the tracks that could have embarrassed their masters, have long since gone from across the river at the back.
‘But Schmidtke doesn’t just live with his memories,’ Finn writes. ‘Tegernsee is the home of other interesting characters, Anna. They are people well known to Schmidtke from the past, some of whom play a part in this story. It is just as I told you and Nana on that New Year’s Eve.’
These residents of Tegernsee are not old spies, like Schmidtke, but Western European financiers, businessmen from the former East Germany, wealthy and now ancient ex-Nazis, and a few retired politicians with multi-tentacled connections. There are people here, apart from Schmidtke, who played double roles in the Cold War and are a link to the extension of that war in this, the new millennium.
‘Tegernsee is so beautiful, so perfect, so private,’ Finn writes, ‘that it is a place where the devil himself might choose to reside, hiding himself behind high gates in a multimillion-dollar chalet like so many of its other inhabitants. And from where, like them, he might choose to emerge in a Hermès jacket, silk polo neck and St Laurent slacks, perfectly tanned, immaculately silver-haired, his features, like theirs, appearing at any time of day or night as if shaved and oiled and pampered by some privately retained gentleman barber only a moment before.
‘This is how these men always look,’ he writes, ‘wherever we see them in the world. They seem to have been briefly animated in order to step out from the pages of a retirement edition of Harpers & Queen, money and deceit oozing from their pores. The devil’s most devilish when respectable. These are men to whom power belongs and, in their Faustian bargain, they themselves belong to that power.’
He lists them, these elite inhabitants of Tegernsee. They are politicians, bankers and financiers, industrialists, ex-Communists and ex-Nazis, and the grey capitalists who hide somewhere in the centre ground.
‘I’m writing up this journal late at night, darling Rabbit. I’m a little drunk and maybe I’m emotional from the loneliness of it all. Loneliness is playing tricks on me, in fact. Last night I dreamed that all the world’s a stage and I’m fighting some devil at the centre of it. “And thus I clothe my naked villainy. And seem a saint when most I play the devil.”
‘That’s what some of these residents of Tegernsee are like, Anna. They seem so perfect.’
I close the book. That’s how he signs off his night’s work, quoting Shakespeare. I imagine him, from this distance in time of his writing, falling into bed, exhausted but fulfilled from choking up the bile of his anger.
Despite the renewed vigour of the burner, the cold drives me out of the vault and into these old streets and I do what I promised myself I wouldn’t do for security reasons; I take with me Finn’s book that recounts those summer months in the year 2000, after his sudden departure from Moscow. Lastly, I slide the handgun with its twelve-inch barrel into a shoulder holster and fill my pockets with shells. Outside it is snowing and a driving bitt
er wind rushes down from the Algauer mountains.
Tegernsee’s charming medieval streets with their low houses and discreet, expensive shops weave around the lake. Tegernsee, I’m now beginning to see, is also perfect for its geographical position. A short road takes you across the Bavarian Alps to Austria or, a little further, to the old Communist East. A different, equally short route, rides over the Algauer Alps to Liechtenstein, and, further west, beside Lake Bodensee, to Switzerland.
Tegernsee is a place of crossings. It is like some petite and perfect geographical transaction, in which money and secrets are exchanged, with private banks and borders of every kind neatly close at hand.
I walk up the street, on to a pavement beside the frozen lake- the See of Tegernsee- and into the thick warmth of a gasthaus, Finn’s precious exercise book tucked safely into my coat.
It is Saturday night and the place is full of locals. Loud Bavarian music is playing from a band on a small, improvised stage and there is dancing. Bavarian regional dress is everywhere: feathered hats, lederhosen, braces, big boots for the drinkers or patent shoes with buckles for the dancers, and the waitresses wear long white full dresses and colourful, embroidered waistcoats. Bavarian traditions are not reserved for tourists.
I sit at a table by the monumental stone fireplace, flaring its flames and heat from monstrous logs, and order food and wine. And then I open Finn’s ‘book of record’, as he calls it.
13
AFTER FINN’S SHOWDOWN with the embassy’s head of station, he was confined to a room in the building while two thuggish escorts from the Service flew out from London to Moscow. They escorted him to Domodyeva airport to the south of the city and the three of them enjoyed a first-class trip to London, courtesy of British Airways.
They take Finn to a house in Norwood in south London, where he is questioned for nearly two weeks.
It is all routine stuff. First a man called Sanders who says he’s from the Russian Desk, but whom Finn has never met, questions him.
‘We want to know about your Russian girl, your Anna, Finn. She’s had a very successful career so far, a shining career. She’s shot up the ladder, it seems. A full colonel at her age! Does she know? How much of a threat is she?’
‘She’s very dangerous indeed,’ Finn says. ‘And I don’t know what she knows.’
His reply holds up the process for a while and Sanders takes the opportunity to confer elsewhere. When he returns, Sanders is with another man, a junior Finn vaguely knows, and they repeat the question.
‘Look,’ Finn says, ‘she’s dangerous, all right, but only to a good night’s sleep.’
‘How do you feel about her?’
‘Feel?’
‘Do you miss her, Finn? Do you miss Anna?’
‘You can’t miss her.’
‘For God’s sake, grow up, Finn,’ Sanders says angrily.
Then they all leave and some old buffer comes along and reels back the years, with questions Finn was asked when he first joined the Service.
‘Have you or any members of your family ever held any extreme political views?’ this man asks kindly.
It was a question that was asked of people who needed clearance for minor civil service jobs rather than clearance for the security services.
‘Am I being prosecuted, then?’ Finn asks. ‘Is this some kind of prelude for doing me under the Official Secrets Act?’
‘My dear chap, no, no, nothing of the kind.’
But then Finn tells the man he does have a member of his family who has extreme political views.
‘Oh yes?’ the buffer says politely, maintaining perfect calm in the face of this unusual statement. ‘And who is that? What are his or her views, Finn?’
‘My aunt thinks Blair is Jesus Christ,’ Finn says.
At this they’re very angry and don’t see him for two days.
‘Will you try to see her again?’ Sanders asks when they all finally come back. But this time they’ve come back with the big guns, with Adrian, Finn’s recruiter and handler and who’s in line for the top job at MI6.
‘As far as she and I are concerned, it was already ten years past our bedtime when we met,’ Finn says. ‘I was too late. But now it’s finished. No. I won’t try to contact her.’
Adrian then leans across the table and puts his hand on Finn’s arm.
‘She doesn’t know the reason we left you in Moscow all that time,’ he breathes. ‘Does she, Finn?’
It is a blunt and almost threatening statement that has all the subtlety of a pair of thumbscrews.
Finn looks back into Adrian’s ruddy face and answers truthfully.
‘No, Adrian, she doesn’t know that.’
‘It would have been so much easier if you’d told us that at the beginning,’ Adrian says. ‘When we brought you in. You could have saved us and yourself an awful lot of trouble.’
Finn doesn’t reply.
Adrian turns gentle now.
‘You’re home, Finn. You’re home now. You’ve done a fine job. You’ll get over her.’
But Finn doesn’t feel he’s home. And he doesn’t feel he’ll get over ‘her’.
Finn’s superiors and the interrogators who visited him at the house in Norwood never thought that he would defect, with or without the ‘Russian girl’.
‘They wanted to tidy me up, that’s all,’ Finn says. ‘And to get me out of their way. They wanted me safely pensioned off. In their eyes I was a worn-out, washed-up, mentally and emotionally compromised ex-officer, and the only thing that really concerned them was that I would keep my mouth shut and how much I was going to cost them in retirement.’
And suddenly he’s writing straight to me.
‘Anna, I felt you with me in that room in London. I loved you then and I love you now.’
It is just a sentence, but it is the first love letter from my lover to me.
After Finn was let go ‘on a long leash’ from Norwood, he tidied up his affairs and visited his aunt and uncle outside Cambridge. Otherwise he kept a low profile so that the Service could be satisfied he wasn’t about to do anything rash.
‘There are enough dissatisfied former intelligence officers in the world,’ he says, ‘and I don’t want to add myself to the list. I’ve seen them many times, the dissatisfied, men whose careers have ended in anger and resentment and demands for bigger payoffs from the Service, men who think they’re worth more but whose real gripe is the fear of a wasted life for which they believe they should be endlessly compensated by other people, by anybody but themselves.’
In typical Finn style, having established this record of what wasn’t motivating him, rather than what was, he then turns a new page and writes just two words.
The Beginning.
In the late autumn of 2000 Finn let it be known to the Service that he was taking a ‘holiday’. But this holiday wasn’t to a beach on the north African coast or to the cultural treasuries of Italy or the Far East. It was to the unusual destination of Saarbrucken, the old coalmining town, long in decline, on the German side at the junction of the three borders of France, Germany and Luxembourg. He was, as he’d warned me in Moscow, going feral.
Here on a dull, cold November day when the wind was blowing fine, freezing sleet down the River Saar and the grey town and the grey sky were fused into one, Finn met an old German acquaintance from the past, in a cheap Chinese restaurant under a grim post-war office building that ran for two blocks down the Goethestrasse from the river.
In this anonymous dead-end town in a backwater of Germany Finn chose the twelve-euro menu and his contact chose the same, and they kept their silence as two Tiger beers were brought across the grubby red and gold, dragon-painted room with its paper lamps that swayed whenever the door was opened on to the grey, damp concrete outside.
Finn doesn’t trust the man who sits opposite him, but he likes him and would like to be able to trust him.
‘A good German,’ as Finn puts it, his tongue firmly in cheek. And then, more thoughtfully
, ‘Dieter is someone who looks beyond the narrow tunnel walls of his job. He thinks for himself, he sees the world moving outside the avenue of his own efforts, and that is why perhaps, like me, he eventually lost his job.’
Finn has known Dieter since 1989, from the time when the British seized Schmidtke at Tegel airport in Berlin, and whisked him to London. Dieter was one of the BND intelligence officers who formally received Schmidtke back into the bosom of German justice when the British bowed to Germany’s insistence that he was theirs.
I think Finn thought of Dieter as being an inappropriate introduction for me, unlike most of his sources. It wasn’t just that Dieter was uninterested in women, but simply that it would have made him uncomfortable to sit down and break bread with an officer of the Russian SVR. Finn never said so, but I felt his reluctance in Dieter’s case came from the fact that Dieter could not compromise with an enemy who had not only enslaved the East of his country but who had also corrupted so much of what was good in the West. Unlike the British and the Americans, Dieter had been fighting the KGB on the front line.
Sometimes I’ve thought that Dieter was an invention of Finn’s. But here he was, written on the page; a ghost, but a living ghost of our past.
Dieter is a tall, slightly stooped man with black hair thinning and greying at the sides. He has a sharp, lean face, and a dark stubble shadows the pale skin of his jaw. He rarely smiles, but seems to carry a burden of solemnity that leaches from his expressionless eyes into the slope of his shoulders and the movements of his hands. He speaks tonelessly, as if giving a statement to disbelieving interrogators.
He joined West Germany’s intelligence service, the BND, at the start of the long post-war years of reformation. While the world watched Germany rise from the ashes and saw its industry thrive and dominate, its foreign service, the BND, and its army, unlike its automobiles and electrical goods, were forbidden from going abroad. By constitutional decree, its spies could not spy beyond its borders.