by Alex Dryden
‘Mikhail?’
‘Mikhail is what we call this source in London. You must write that in your first report to them.’
He squirms his foot into the sand.
‘So your job, then,’ he says carefully, ‘is to find out who Mikhail is. Perfect. We have breathing space. We can string them along for some time, keeping them waiting for that.’
‘To find the enemy within,’ I say.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘that’s why you’re here professionally.’ He turns and grins and then his face becomes serious.
‘I’ve missed you, Rabbit. I’m so happy with you. Is it the same for you?’
‘Can’t you tell?’
‘Can’t you tell me?’
I’m thinking of Vladimir, of my deceit, and the foul taste it leaves in my throat now.
I put my hand on his face and we look at each other.
‘I’ve missed you too, Finn.’
‘Good. So that’s all right then,’ he says, and smiles easily.
‘I have to tell you something,’ I say.
He looks at me as if he knows what I’m going to say, but I go on anyway.
‘You remember Vladimir?’
‘Your old school friend? The man your dad wanted you to marry?’
‘Yes.’
‘You haven’t gone and married him, have you?’
‘No. He’s my new case officer on you, Finn.’
‘Very clever of them.’
‘Yes,’ I agree, and know that Finn is right. It is very clever of them and I have to be careful with Vladimir.
‘We trained at the Forest for two weeks before I came out here,’ I say.
‘And you slept together.’
‘Yes, we did.’
Finn looks at me and kisses me lightly on the lips.
‘And that’s very clever of you, darling,’ he says.
There is no need to say more. He understands everything.
We get up and walk slowly back along the beach with our arms around each other. Finn talks in a businesslike way, but all his tension from before has gone. That is what the truth does, I think.
‘You have your arrangements to communicate with them?’ Finn says as we walk slowly.
‘I have a contact in London,’ I answer. ‘Another in Geneva, whichever is closer. I’m supposed to check in every eleven days, even if there’s nothing worth saying. We have our usual rules of contact,’ I say.
‘And Moscow?’ Finn says.
‘They’ll contact me if they want me to go to Moscow.’
‘Nothing set in stone, then,’ he replies.
‘In London there was a contact who kept in touch with one of the trade reps at our embassy there, but who’s now been recalled,’ I say hesitantly. ‘A low-level Russian businessman working on the edge of the City. His handler was one of our long-standing trade reps at the embassy, from the Forest.’
‘This contact was arrested by your people a short while ago, however. He was released and he’s been replaced by another “businessman”,’ I say.
‘Why was he arrested?’ Finn says.
‘He’d been spotted by the Service coming out of a public convenience in Hyde Park,’ I say. ‘He was still doing up his zip. That’s what alerted MI5, apparently. They’d found a package concealed in a cistern and were watching the place and saw this guy come out doing up his zip. You wouldn’t believe the fuss at the Forest. He’s really in the shit. According to us, the English don’t come out of public conveniences doing up their zips. The Forest believes that’s why he was spotted as a foreigner.’
I laugh and Finn joins me.
‘So there’s a new contact for you in London.’
‘He’s called Valentin Malenkov,’ I say. ‘Highly trained, very special to us, one of our very best, in fact. A perfect English speaker travelling on a Swiss passport under the name Franz Noiber. He’s Forest to the core.’
‘He’ll know that he should do up his zip, then,’ Finn says.
We walk on and stop, holding each other from time to time. It feels closer than we’ve ever been.
‘We have to make sure you deliver,’ Finn says.
‘Yes.’
‘Every ten days we’ll compile your report, the two of us together,’ he says. ‘You have to be useful. You have to give them good stuff. That way we’ll buy ourselves time.’
The last time we stop before we reach the huts, Finn holds my hands.
‘Are you ready to leave?’ he says. ‘We can just forget everything but us, if you like. I’ll stop this now if you’re ready to come with me. We can start a pig farm. If you’re ready to leave,’ he says.
I don’t reply. I can’t make the leap.
‘Patrushev told me they’d look after Nana for me,’ I say.
Finn looks at me, with sympathy in his eyes.
‘And what does Nana say?’
‘She said, “Would you rather spend your time with Finn or with Patrushev?” ’
Finn laughs.
‘I want to come,’ I say. ‘I will come.’
‘When you’re ready,’ Finn says, understanding my fears, and we walk back, stopping once to kiss each other for so long it was as if a premonition of bad things crouched over us and we clung to each other for shelter.
23
TWO THINGS HAPPENED in the following seven days that changed the bright colours of our briefly carefree existence to black. The first event altered the psychological landscape for the whole world but the second was more personal, it attacked our world directly–Finn’s anyway, and therefore mine.
One late afternoon as the first cool September breeze blew in from the sea, Willy came running over to the shack where Finn and I were working on my first report to submit to the Forest. I had never seen Willy look agitated, let alone excited. He wore his past lightly and he took bad news in the same way he took good news, with tolerant equanimity.
‘Quick, come quick,’ he said.
Finn and I looked at each other, fearing that our hideaway had been discovered or worse, and immediately left what we were doing and followed Willy to the restaurant. He had an old radio that was screwed to the bar. It was a thing of great value to him, and reminded him of his youth when tuning into the BBC’s World Service up in a friend’s attic in Budapest could have had him imprisoned. He still treated a radio with reverence fifty years later.
One or two of the less stoned inhabitants of Willy’s little enclave on the beach were gathered around the radio and their normal expressions of varying degrees of blankness were relatively animated. He pushed them out of the way so that he and Finn and I could lean in closer.
‘A plane has hit a building in New York,’ Willy said.
We listened to the commentary as the second plane hit and stories flew around the airwaves of other planes in America that were evidently aimed at American targets. I don’t know how long we listened, but Finn and Willy must have drunk half a case of beer. It was an hour or more before we knew we wouldn’t know anything more that day and Willy switched off the radio, as if it were a precious finite resource that needed to be rested. Then we sat down for an early supper.
‘It’s not events that change history, but the way people react to them,’ I remember Finn saying, and Willy nodding with his mouth full of freshly caught red snapper, perhaps remembering Hungary again, back in 1956.
‘Whoever did this did it in the cause of chaos,’ Willy said eventually. ‘The devil loves chaos.’
Finn said prophetically, if strangely in the circumstances, ‘This will be good for Russia, for Putin.’
‘Surely you’re not going to blame it on Russia!’ I said, and felt the gap yawn between defending my country as a place, as a people, and defending the clique who ruled it.
‘No, no,’ he said and gently held my arm. ‘I don’t think that. But it will open a window of opportunity for Putin.’
He was right. The benefits, from a Russian point of view, of the thousands dead in New York, and the subsequent chaos in Ira
q and Afghanistan, was that the CIA and MI6 would cut their Russian operations still further. By the end of 2006 the British would devote only five per cent of their intelligence budget to Russia, instead of forty per cent at the end of the Cold War.
In America, George W. Bush said, in a bid to muster worldwide support for his military plans, that he ‘had looked into President Putin’s soul and liked what he saw’. Putin strongly supported Bush’s second presidential campaign against Kerry who might have restrained the American invasion of Iraq. In Russia, and increasingly beyond our borders, we were free to join the amorphous war on terror created by Bush.
But it was the second event in those seven days that hit Finn far harder, being almost a fatal blow to his personal mission. Again Willy came hurrying over. We were putting the finishing touches to my report by this time. Willy was carrying a satellite phone. There was no mobile connection.
‘Finn,’ he said. ‘You must call Frank…’ He checked his watch. ‘Call in about eight minutes.’
Finn took the phone and walked up the beach. He didn’t come back for over an hour and when he did he was white in the face.
‘The boy’s dead,’ he said inexplicably and sat hunched in the sand in front of the crates Willy and I were sitting on, and hugged his knees, rocking gently. ‘They killed him.’
‘What boy, Finn? Who?’
He looked me in the eyes and I saw how angry he was.
‘There’s a boy I spoke to…’ he said. ‘I put the squeeze on this boy in Luxembourg. About Exodi.’
‘What do you mean, he’s dead?’ Willy said quietly. ‘How is he dead? Killed, you mean?’
Finn picked up a handful of sand and let it slide through his fingers.
‘Frank says he was found in a rental car in a lock-up in Metz across the border. Engine running. He was suffocated by the fumes. The boy couldn’t have afforded to rent a car, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Did Frank say that?’ Willy asked.
‘No, he didn’t.’ Finn paused. ‘He gave me the benefit of the doubt,’ he added bitterly.
‘You didn’t kill him, Finn,’ I said.
‘This is what they do,’ Willy said. ‘You know that. That’s why we fight these people. To prevent them from doing things like this.’
‘A war of prevention,’ Finn said mockingly.
‘Back in the seventies,’ Willy said, ‘when I used to go over the Wall, something that concerned the British was Hungary’s development of nuclear power. The Soviets used Hungarian nuclear facilities to provide Moscow with plutonium. One of my contacts in Budapest, a scientist, didn’t like this arrangement. He gave me much information that filled in the picture for your people in London. The scientist was found in a vat of molten aluminium. It’s a war, Finn.’
‘Your scientist knew what he was doing and took the risk. This boy had no choice.’
‘You say Frank gave you the benefit of the doubt,’ Willy said. ‘There’s no evidence of anyone else being involved. The boy may have killed himself. We don’t know.’
‘They don’t leave evidence,’ Finn snapped.
Willy went to get a bottle of Scotch and we tried to talk to Finn but he was adamant. What Willy and I were both thinking, however, was that the boy’s death confirmed the value of what he’d told Finn.
‘We don’t know what happened,’ I said. I put my arms around Finn and held him close. ‘You have a choice, Finn. You can choose to believe he was killed and you can equally choose to believe he took his own life.’
Finn had a child’s attitude to his work, he’d always told me he had. Maybe we all do in this business. Finn once told me that he enjoyed putting himself in dangerous situations so that he could get out of them. He said that, for him, this was what made life worth living. But he also said it was the attitude of youth. It was the attitude of youthful pursuits, like mountaineering or any extreme sport, which normal people eventually grow out of.
The two of us walked up the beach as the sun sank and merged with the orange sea on the horizon. We didn’t talk for a long time.
The following day, we packed my things–Finn was travelling light–and Willy drove us to Aix-en-Provence in his car. Our farewell to Willy was sombre. Finn made no attempt to be cheerful, or even grateful, in the knowledge, I suppose, that we would be meeting again before long and that a new beginning was never far away. We caught a train and began a series of changes that slowly took us to the West, to Brittany, where Bride of the Wind lay on a mooring in a quiet estuary.
Finn could never be cheerless for long and rebounded from his grief with almost inappropriate speed. But somewhere, deep inside him, I knew that the boy’s death had been filed away, fuel for future action and, perhaps, guilt.
It was a beautiful clear night when we sailed for England, but the cold of autumn was coming in off the Atlantic. I had never been on a boat before and Finn showed me what to do if he should fall off. We sat on deck for most of the night. Finn explained what he had to do from now on, and how he needed my help. It had taken him more than a year to get this far and he knew he was only at the beginning of a long journey.
As dawn broke on the English side of the channel, Finn said, ‘What they’ll do at the Forest in the coming months, years perhaps, is to try to drive a wedge between us. That’s what we have to be most careful of.’
24
I MOVED INTO FINN’S LIFE and his apartment in Camden Town in the autumn of 2001 and so began a long game of manipulation and double lives that was to last nearly four years and in which the only constant, the only truth we knew we could rely on, was each other. Slowly, as we came to see we were both fighting our own sides to maintain our fictions, we became our own sole source of comfort and trust.
For Finn, his fiction, his double life meant diligently pursuing investigative work for the commercial company in Mayfair where Adrian and the Service could keep an eye on him. He cut his hair and wore a suit, he looked more respectable than I’d ever seen him, and we even went, once, to spend a weekend with Adrian and Penny at their country house in Gloucestershire, where Adrian flirted openly with me in front of his wife and asked me questions about the Forest and if there was anything he could do to make my life more comfortable in London–a comment that I took to mean him personally and not the establishment.
Finn and Adrian met from time to time alone so that Adrian could question Finn about my reasons for leaving Russia, and Finn I believe came as close as was possible in this secret world to convincing Adrian that I had left. And Adrian needed too some satisfaction that Finn no longer gave any credence to Mikhail.
Finn also took trips abroad for the company, and on each of these trips, he would fit another piece into the jigsaw, make the picture he was trying to illuminate a little clearer. His feral side now wore a dark suit.
Occasionally, one of his contacts came to London, on other business. Of all of them it was Frank whom I met first. He came over to attend the funeral of a retired ex-Service officer named Haroldson and Frank, Finn and I went together to Mortlake cemetery, where Adrian and a smattering of Service people came to pay their final respects. Adrian was more relaxed with Finn than I’d seen him before, and Finn’s presence at the funeral seemed to reassure him that Finn had come back into the fold.
We took Frank out to dinner afterwards at a restaurant in Soho and I saw the closeness of his friendship with Finn that went beyond any professional necessity. We talked about Frank’s daughters–his wife was dead–and about Frank’s plans for retirement, which sounded similar to Dieter’s, a bucolic dream that seemed to me like the postponement of regret. At the end of dinner, I saw Frank leave his copy of the Evening Standard on the table and I saw Finn pick it up. Whenever they met they were working.
For me, my fiction, my double life, was to drip-feed reports back to Moscow with sufficiently developing information to make my masters appreciate my worth in London. But my main task was to make them believe that Finn still worked for MI6 and that the Service itself, not just Finn,
was avidly interested in Mikhail. This was absolutely crucial to my remaining in London. Finn and I both knew that he would become expendable as soon as the Forest believed he was on his own.
We designed these reports so that they would ask more questions than they answered. But of course they had to give away information Finn would rather not have given up. I slowly revealed MI6’s progress with Exodi, with the Uzbekistan connections and General Baseer, with the Luxembourg MP and the secret accounts at Westbank.
The Forest was delighted with Mikhail even though it was just a codename. I heard that a new and special file had been opened on the case and headed ‘Mikhail’.
In this period up to the spring and summer of 2005, Putin built up a hierarchy of power in Russia that harked back to Peter the Great. He won the presidency again in 2004, with such embarrassing ease that Grigory Yavlinsky, the head of Russia’s Liberal party, said, ‘And who invented this system? It used to take a slightly different form, but it was invented by Stalin in the 1930s.’
Slowly, power was drained from the executive, from parliament–the Duma-from the regions, the judiciary, the Federation Council, business and the media. It all found its way into the hands of the siloviki, the men of power, the KGB and its ultimate master Directorate ‘S’.
The first breaths of democracy that Russia had taken in the nineties were stifled. Putin told Bush that Russia would have democracy, but democracy according to the traditions of Russia. As everyone knew, Russia had no traditions of democracy.
And Putin himself became an iconic figure. In a factory in the Ural mountains, furry rabbits were manufactured that sang a pop song about the President:
I want to change my guy
For a man like Putin
One like Putin who is strong
One like Putin who won’t insult me
One like Putin who won’t leave me.