Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  Like that comment of Nana’s, Vladimir, too, had exposed everything that I hated about myself: my job, my position–everything I was still unwilling to give up in order to go with Finn. I was suddenly reminded of my father and his anger, and his inability to change. I was reminded of the grip of the past on him. And, now, it seemed, the past had its grip on me.

  We drank a coffee together. Vladimir told me what had happened to him back in our new dawn of 1991 when we were promised our freedom.

  He had been encouraged to speak out, he told me, as we all were back then in the era of perestroika and glasnost and Yeltsin’s ascent to power. At the Forest they had asked him to voice any concerns about the way the Forest was run, anything at all that struck him as wrong or wasteful or outdated. Foolishly, Vladimir took them at their word. He told his questioners that he thought it was wrong for senior officers to use official cars for their own private business, a common practice in the nineties and today. He was praised for this honesty, and then summoned the following day to his observer’s office, where a lieutenant colonel was waiting for him.

  ‘We’re sending you to the Cape Verde Islands,’ the officer told him abruptly.

  Stunned, Vladimir replied that he didn’t speak Portuguese.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the lieutenant colonel told him. ‘We’ll blind you, too, so you won’t be able to see anything either.’

  And so Vladimir had spent nearly ten years in Cape Verde, in exile, effectively, doing nothing apart from learning perfect Portuguese. They hadn’t actually blinded him but such a fate as Vladimir’s, I was suddenly reminded, was and still is today the result of the self-defeating vindictiveness of the organisation I work for.

  We said goodbye and arranged to meet the following week.

  After waiting for nearly two hours for this ‘urgent’ meeting, I was finally called up to Kerchenko’s office.

  There were three of them there, including Kerchenko. The other two were the case officers who also worked on Finn’s dossier. Yuri, one of the ‘new KGB’ Russians from Petersburg, lounged in a corner with his feet up as if to make it clear he didn’t take orders from an old-timer like Kerchenko.

  I knew Yuri took a cut from a logging business out in northern Siberia and had become rich from the new black market run by the nexus of security officers and mafia buzinessmen.

  The other one, Sasha, like Kerchenko an old Brezhnevite, had a lined face and bushy eyebrows. He sat to the side of the room with his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor like a prisoner. The General sat behind the overlarge desk so favoured in former times by self-important bureaucrats.

  Before I had even sat down Kerchenko asked me where Finn was. He used our codename for Finn, which was Markus.

  I didn’t reply until I’d sat in the empty chair in front of the desk.

  ‘I haven’t seen him for more than three days,’ I said.

  I knew immediately that I was under suspicion; a cross-examination began, questions flew from all three of them, from all sides simultaneously.

  I calmly and clearly told them about our last meeting and, in particular, everything that Finn had said about Putin. It was all stuff that was in the report I had made the day after he and I had met. I always made a report after every encounter with Finn.

  I recounted Finn’s anxiety and his anger with his own people. I didn’t tell them the whole truth, nothing about his invitation to me to go with him but just enough, I hoped, to manipulate the manipulators who see betrayal and falsehood everywhere. What I really wanted to know was what had caused them to call me in so suddenly, but I concealed my interest in the reasons for their inquiries as well as I could. Of course they weren’t satisfied.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us he was leaving Moscow?’ the bald Yuri barked eventually, and simultaneously snapped the buckle of his expensive watch. He looked at me with all the lust of assumed conquest.

  My shock was evident.

  ‘You didn’t know?’ Kerchenko said accusingly.

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  There was a pause while they watched me.

  ‘When did he leave?’ I asked, in an attempt at professional, rather than personal curiosity.

  ‘This morning. On the British Airways flight to London. With two officials from London,’ Kerchenko said.

  ‘You didn’t know,’ Yuri sneered. ‘You didn’t know.’

  I ignored him, looking at the watch on his wrist and thinking how brashly our new officers now wore their illegal wealth.

  ‘Why didn’t he tell you he was leaving?’ Sasha asked so softly that I could barely hear the question. He still hadn’t looked up from the floor.

  ‘I don’t know why. He doesn’t tell me everything.’

  ‘Surely he would tell you something like this,’ Yuri demanded.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose he would. Normally. So I suppose it must have been a sudden decision.’

  ‘Of his? Or theirs?’ Sasha asked softly again.

  ‘I can’t say. Of theirs, I guess. Unless he’s ill, or has family problems.’

  ‘What was his mood?’ Sasha said from under the bushy eyebrows which were all I could see of his face. It was a question that was asked many times during that afternoon and evening.

  ‘Just anxious. And, as I said, angry. He was very angry.’

  ‘Did he say anything unusual to you at this recent meeting?’ Kerchenko asked. ‘Your last meeting. Anything that seemed too unimportant at the time, perhaps, to include in your report?’

  I thought for a moment, giving them time to register this moment of contemplation. And then I smiled. It was Finn’s instruction to tell them that made me smile, but they weren’t to know that.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Yuri said. ‘You’ve lost a British intelligence officer you’re being paid to stay up close to night and day. What’s so fucking funny?’

  ‘What he said,’ I replied coolly. ‘That’s what was funny.’

  Kerchenko raised his eyebrows and Sasha looked up at last.

  ‘Well?’ Kerchenko said.

  ‘He told me he loved me,’ I said.

  There was a moment of silence in the room, the first real silence since I’d arrived. For me, it was unnervingly a thing of beauty. Finn had invaded the room. I was thinking only of Finn.

  It was Yuri, inevitably, who finally brought me back.

  ‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘Falling for our whore.’

  ‘I am a colonel in the SVR,’ I reprimanded him. ‘I am not your, or anyone’s, whore.’

  I looked at Yuri’s face and saw the amorphous hate I’d seen so often in my father’s face. To me it came from a fury that anyone was capable of independent thought.

  ‘So,’ Sasha said, recapping my words, ‘you said that this was funny.’ I liked Sasha for that.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘To me it is funny, yes. For a colonel in the SVR to be told by a British intelligence officer that he loves her–yes, that’s funny. He’s been out of control for some time,’ I continued. ‘It’s in my reports. But this was a new low. It seemed such an obvious, ridiculous thing to say to me. Apparently he’s lost it.’

  ‘And you’ve lost him,’ Yuri said.

  ‘Why isn’t it in your report that he told you he loved you?’ Kerchenko asked, turning a page in a mannered way so as not to meet my eye. I wanted to laugh at his pomposity next to the question.

  ‘It meant nothing. It was just one more symptom of his loss of discipline. It’s not an important piece of information.’

  ‘Maybe you were embarrassed?’ Kerchenko said.

  ‘Embarrassed, no,’ I replied. ‘Disgusted. It was laughable. As I say, it was a complete collapse of discipline and I’ve reported on his loss of discipline extensively.’

  ‘Yes,’ the General said heavily. ‘We were hoping you would take more advantage of that than you have. We’ve been expecting some results for some time from his apparent disintegration; something that tells us what he’s been doing in Moscow for so long. Far too long.
But now he’s gone.’

  ‘It’s something that’s been discussed in this room many times,’ I agreed. ‘But on the instructions I was given I didn’t want to alarm him, scare him off. He’s been quite unstable for some time. He could do anything, in my opinion.’

  ‘So you’ve said,’ Kerchenko replied, leafing through Finn’s dossier. ‘Do you believe that he…he loves you?’ he said squeamishly, as if he’d just discovered some chewing gum attached to the underside of his desk.

  Yuri snorted.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘But he said so.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he’s never said so before.’

  ‘No.’

  At this moment, Patrushev entered the room.

  11

  WHEN I’D GOT OVER the shock of Patrushev actually appearing at the Forest, it was clear that the FSB chief, our new boss of the renamed and airbrushed KGB, had been sitting in an adjoining room, wired to ours. But at the moment he entered the room, I was completely taken aback. The others, while making their respect obvious to Patrushev, looked even more astonished.

  Patrushev didn’t come to foreign intelligence territory, to the Forest. He and the SVR chief were fierce rivals and there was no precedent as far as I knew for the two agencies entering each other’s ground. Foreign and home intelligence waged a low-key war against each other. It was said that three of Patrushev’s agents had been arrested in Paris a few months before while following a group of Chechens in the French capital. The Forest, angry that their rivals were performing a foreign intelligence function, had tipped off the French security services.

  I had seen Patrushev a few times before, but only from afar. He had spoken at KGB functions and afterwards worked the room, vodka in hand, but I had never been introduced.

  On this afternoon Nikolai Patrushev was dressed in his trademark grey suit and red tie. A tall, hawkish man, his receding hair was brushed over a balding patch and his thin nose appeared to hover over thinner lips. His eyes had a hard, mesmerising stare that ensured you met his gaze. He was Putin’s close ally, which might explain how he could appear at the Forest on the territory of his rival. I suppose Finn was a moving target between agencies but Patrushev’s presence could only have suggested Putin’s personal interest in the case.

  Patrushev had come with Putin, like so many of the president’s acolytes, from his St Petersburg clan, the gang Putin collected around him from the time when he was deputy mayor of the city. Like Putin, he had collaborated with the KGB since he was a student. The two of them were practically born to the profession, but by nature not background.

  Patrushev’s job was to guard the President’s back while the new order was being put into place before and during Putin’s rise to power. His personal guardianship of Putin was all in the name of national security, of course.

  He stood in silence for a moment, instilling a sort of cold quietness into the room. A military man, tall, erect and proud of the military achievements in his family, he is the perfect KGB clone. His fitness from playing the favoured KGB sport of volleyball was evident from his lean strength. I knew he chaired the sport’s national organisation. From gossip among acquaintances over at the FSB headquarters in Moscow, I also knew he read thrillers and spy stories obsessively, after a personal assistant hired for the purpose recommended the best ones. Otherwise he attended the Bolshoi regularly, but only to listen to Russian composers. And he hunted, drank vodka and collected weaponry.

  After the surprise and then their oleaginous deference to the KGB boss, the three men in the room were silenced by his arrival. I stood automatically and he looked me over with what is normally called a practised eye.

  There followed a complicated procedure, as there were only four chairs in the room. Kerchenko gave up his seat to Patrushev and took Yuri’s. Yuri took Sasha’s and Sasha was told to get another chair. I sat back down where I was.

  Patrushev leaned his elbows on the desk, tucked the back of his hands under his chin and wasted no time.

  ‘Anna, I want you to tell us what really goes on behind this man’s ramblings,’ he said in a clipped voice. ‘I don’t think any of us really believes that he is a drunk who rants on and on for nothing, do we? Or some obsessive at London’s Speaker’s Corner. His outspokenness about Vladimir Vladimirovich is a little hard to take at face value, don’t you think?’

  His use of my first name, rather than my rank, indicated that the meeting was to take a new turn and for the first time I felt nervous. In some walks of life, such intimacy is only menacing. Patrushev’s presence had raised the stakes enormously. Whatever the reason Finn interested them, it was no longer because they believed they could turn him. Patrushev wouldn’t be taking a personal role otherwise.

  But I didn’t see any need to reply beyond tilting my head in uncertain agreement.

  ‘So. Why do you think he is so interested in giving us his thoughts on how much the West should distrust our president? What is he hoping to gain from this?’ Patrushev then began to answer his own question. ‘Unlike some, I don’t think it was a prelude to him coming over to us,’ he said, casting a withering look at General Kerchenko. ‘You don’t tell your girlfriend you hate her mother before you ask her to marry you, do you? Tell me your thoughts please, Anna, based on your very special position with him.’

  ‘I’m sure that he never intended to defect,’ I agreed and got cold looks from the General and Yuri. ‘I think he genuinely dislikes the President, however, fears him perhaps, fears what Russia can become under his leadership. I think he is genuine in that.’

  ‘But why is he so keen for us to know this?’ Patrushev pressed me without a pause. ‘There’s barely a report of yours since New Year’s Eve that doesn’t contain his thoughts on the subject.’

  ‘I don’t feel that he is really talking to me at all,’ I said truthfully. ‘I believe when he tells me what he thinks about the President it is as if he is talking to his own people. He says it to me because of his frustration that nobody in London will listen to him. I don’t think he has any motive for letting us know his thoughts. I think he’s angry, frustrated, but he’s not trying to give us any kind of message.’

  ‘Maybe he’s trying to get you to agree with him about our president,’ Kerchenko said, with some accusation in his voice. ‘To subvert you, perhaps, so that you’ll help him get whatever it is he’s after.’

  Patrushev gave him a sharp look and then looked back at me again.

  ‘I agree with you,’ Patrushev said to me. ‘He’s not trying to give us or you any message at all. But now he has finally vented his anger about British policy to his superiors, where he formerly aired it only to you. He’s stepped over the line, and they’ve recalled him to London. Would you agree?’

  ‘I think he has committed professional suicide, yes,’ I said. ‘I think it’s been coming for a long time. They put up with his increasingly undisciplined behaviour but now he’s gone too far.’

  ‘A spent force…’ Patrushev said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said immediately, and I didn’t know why I said it. Perhaps it was Finn’s remark, ‘I’m going feral.’ Perhaps, too, it was the missing element in my conversation with Finn at the Baltschug–his assumption, the fact that he didn’t think it mattered that I wouldn’t go with him, because it was inevitable we would be thrown together again.

  ‘Oh?’ Patrushev said and there was a clammy silence in the room. ‘A British spy is suddenly taken home for insubordination concerning the most fundamental level of policy and he is not a spent force? What will he do? Write a book, perhaps, exposing the limitations of Britain’s intelligence service? Another David Shayler?’

  ‘Perhaps the whole thing’s a set-up,’ I said. ‘They want it to seem as though he’s been sacked.’

  ‘That’s good. Yes, that’s good. But you don’t think he’s another Shayler. Your valuable instincts tell you he’s not.’

  ‘They do.’

 
‘Use them,’ he said and leaned over towards me. ‘Think independently. You are a good officer for that reason. Your progress has been noted with approval for some time. Think freely.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, but I was thinking about my conversation with Vladimir earlier in the afternoon and how their encouragement to think freely had landed him a ten-year exile in the Cape Verde Islands.

  ‘But be careful,’ Patrushev said slowly, as if reading my thoughts. ‘Remember where his independence, unbridled, undisciplined, seems to have got him.’ For a moment I was confused as to whether he was talking about Vladimir or Finn. ‘Independent thought is not anarchic thought,’ Patrushev explained.

  ‘No, sir,’ I said, though that seemed to me to be exactly what it was.

  ‘But first, let’s get some tea,’ he said to nobody in particular and Kerchenko gave the order with a nod of his head to Sacha who picked up the phone and called for tea.

  ‘I like all your reports, Anna,’ Patrushev said. The use of my name again made me increasingly wary. ‘They are a mix of the factual and personal. They have insight.’

  I judged that I had thanked him enough by now.

  ‘But no one, no one can get everything into a report. The apparently unimportant comment, the throwaway line, the nuance, the remark that seems to mean something but means something else. And, simply, the forgotten. All that could amount to a whole volume for a twenty-minute conversation, as I’m sure you’re aware.’

  He then went back over a dozen of my reports on Finn, apparently at random, which had been submitted by me over the past twelve months. The tea arrived, and it was drunk. Kerchenko looked impatient but also seemed to be struggling to control it. The other two were bored and looked as if they wanted something stronger than tea.

  We must have spent two hours meticulously treading back over old ground, dissecting a sentence here, a glimpse of behaviour there. Patrushev showed no sign of tiring. Then he finally closed the files and put his elbows on the desk and looked at me. Was the meeting over or was this simply a change of tack?