by Alex Dryden
‘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 anot
her 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.
30
I DON’T KNOW what time it was–sometime after midnight certainly–when I was woken by the sound of hammering on the door of the dacha. It blended with a dream until I was awake and realised it was real. I put on a dressing gown and came out of my room. In the dark I could make out Nana already standing in the living room. No lights were on. She seemed frozen, in the middle of the room, stiff as if at some memory of other night-time awakenings in her distant past.
‘What is it? Nana what is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. Then she turned towards me. ‘Anna, darling,’ she said. ‘Come here.’
We embraced and held each other for a minute perhaps. But the knocking on the door resumed louder than before.
‘Goodbye, darling Anna,’ she said, and squeezed me as hard as her old arms were able.
I broke away from her finally and switched on a table light and we embraced briefly again. I felt tears coming to my eyes, but
hers were clear. She just watched me, watched every movement I made. ‘Get dressed,’ she said, and moved towards the door. ‘I’ll let them in.’
As I dressed quickly, I heard from my room the door open and the voice of Vladimir.
He was standing in the centre of the living room when I came out. Nana was fetching something from the kitchen.
‘I’m sorry for the time,’ he said calmly. ‘Please. Don’t be too alarmed. I expect they’re being deliberately antisocial, that’s all.’
But I didn’t believe him.
‘Where are we going?’
‘The Lubyanka. But first we’ll stop at my place.’
Nana emerged from the kitchen carrying something wrapped in a cloth.
‘Take this for breakfast,’ she said, and glared at Vladimir.
‘I’ll wait in the car,’ he said sheepishly.
Nana and I held each other.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I haven’t told you before, darling Anna, but I haven’t got long to go. It’s good. I’m glad. It’s time.’
I cried openly.
From the pocket of her dressing gown she took a silver amulet that I saw was very old.
‘It’s a Tartar charm,’ she said. ‘Made five centuries ago. It will keep you safe.’
With tears in my eyes, I left the dacha and saw her standing in the hot night against the light of the door.
Vladimir drove out of the forest and on to the motorway towards Moscow. We didn’t talk. I sat numbly in the seat beside him and slowly gathered my thoughts. And as I did so, I began to regain some calm. This was routine, I told myself, at least in the perverse world in which my employers operated. If I were being arrested, it would not be Vladimir. They’d have sent their own militia.
We crossed the Moskva River and drove to Vladimir’s apartment near the botanical gardens. He pulled the car into the kerb and put his hand on my knee.
‘Let’s have a coffee before we go,’ he said. ‘And maybe something stronger.’
Upstairs in the apartment on the seventh floor, he made coffee and put a half-empty bottle of vodka on the table in the kitchen. I sat and watched him.
‘I think it’s OK,’ he said. ‘I think they’re just trying to put you on the wrong foot. But you might as well be fortified.’
He smiled at me, poured two shots of vodka, and I drained mine at once. Once more, against my better judgement, I was grateful for his courtesy and care.
And then all I felt was him catch me as I swayed and slipped from the hard wooden kitchen chair.
All I was aware of at first was noise, but I couldn’t place the noise, its origin or its identity. It hummed and throbbed and ground in my ears as I tipped from consciousness and back into unconsciousness. Slowly I realised why my only sensation was the noise. I felt the blindfold across my eyes first, before I realised I couldn’t see. Then I felt the hardness of the place where I was confined, the bruising pain as my body thumped against its surface. And then I felt the bonds around my hands and feet and legs.
I tried to lift the top half of my body but my head immediately came into contact with a hard surface. I was in a box, a metal box that thrashed around as if it were being thrown down a river. My hearing came and went, so that now from time to time I could hear something more distinct, not just amorphous noise beating in my ears. And then I smelled rubber and, after that, the faint fumes of a car’s exhaust. Then I knew I was being taken in the boot of a car.
I tried to move my legs, but they were bound too tightly and finally I lay sti
ll as every movement I made caused me pain as I was thrown around the small space. With my fingers I felt a small handle that I could get two fingers into. Perhaps it was something that would have held the spare tyre if there’d been one, and I held on as best I could to stop myself from being shaken. Then I felt the bumpiness of a rutted road turn into the tipping wave motion of an unmade track and finally the car stopped with a jerk that threw me against the back of the seats.
I listened in the silence. A door opened, but there were no voices. I heard the door slam again. And then I heard the latch pop on something near my head and the whining of an unoiled hinge and I felt the cool air on my face.
Hands untied my blindfold. I was staring straight into the sun and could see nothing. I turned away and shut my eyes in pain and then I heard Vladimir’s voice.
‘Easy,’ he said.
He lifted me up and out of the boot of the car and when my eyes had finally adjusted from the darkness of the boot to the brightness of the sun, I saw we were in a forest of pine trees. He untied my hands first. Why untie my hands to shoot me, I thought? Why show me my executioner at all? But then he untied my feet, knowing, I guess, that long confinement would have made my limbs too cramped to run or put up a struggle. He gave me a bottle of water.
‘Drink this,’ he said.
I drank thirstily while he spoke with matter-of-fact urgency.
‘You’re in Finland,’ he said. ‘We’re eight miles or so across the border. We were just in time.’
‘Why…?’ I said feebly. My head throbbed from the drug he’d given me, and from the journey.
‘It doesn’t matter. You’re out, that’s all that matters. There’s money, a passport, and other things in this bag. There’s some food, more water too.’
I struggled to stand up, but he gently restrained me.
‘Why did you drug me?’ I asked him.
‘Because I knew you wouldn’t believe me,’ he said. ‘I knew if I told you that I had to get you out, you’d think it was a trap.’