Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  So Finn knows that Adrian is getting him onside with this anecdote.

  Adrian picks up the wine list and makes a big thing of choosing an extremely expensive Burgundy.

  ‘Special occasion,’ Adrian says. ‘I want you to know there’s no hard feelings for what happened in Moscow. Let alone your little walk in Germany,’ he added.

  ‘Thank you, Adrian,’ Finn says, but he is thinking about Mikhail, his source, his raison d’être for seven long years.

  ‘Well, right now,’ Adrian continues when the waitress has gone, ‘we’re in a situation which is not unlike the one back then, in ninety-five. But this time we have a new president, Putin, who can really put the past behind Russia, get rid of the Communists for good. He’s got terrific ratings with ordinary Russians. Which he needs,’ Adrian protests, ‘in spite of your harsh view of him. The point is, Putin can make a difference. Bring Russia into the community of nations at last.

  ‘OK, so he’s not whiter than white. Chechnya was–is- a bloody sham. But we’re all grown-ups and we need to see that Russia has to be handled by a strongman for the time being.’ Adrian looks sadly serious. ‘They’re not, actually, ready for a true democracy yet, Finn. It’s too early, you know. You know that.’

  Somehow Finn bites his tongue on a number of possible protest points. He suddenly feels he isn’t hungry at all.

  But Adrian is off on another tack, no doubt connected in some way to the Clinton and aluminium story.

  ‘Those special reports you did for us a few months ago,’ Adrian reminds him. ‘One of your last reports, I believe. A round-up of the Russian oligarchs, if you like, and where they stand in the line of power and money. They’re the people we need, here in the West, and we need them to have the support of Putin and, for that, we need to encourage Putin, not tick him off every time he sends an army into Chechnya, or bumps off a bloody journalist. There are bigger fish to fry.

  ‘Anyway, those reports were bloody good, Finn. You really got beneath the skin. You showed us the oligarchs, warts and all. The mafia network, their KGB connections, the rough and tumble of the way business is being done in Russia today. Brilliant stuff. Most of all you showed us just how vast their wealth is. Well, we need that wealth, Finn, we need it circulating in the world’s economy, making more money, not just stuck in trust accounts in the Caymans, bugger all use to anyone.

  ‘What I’m saying,’ Adrian taps the table, ‘is that, while the reports you did were damn good, they gave us exactly the wrong message.’

  Finn is momentarily taken aback by this hairpin turn in Adrian’s line of thought.

  ‘They gave us the true message,’ Finn counters finally.

  ‘The truth is not always the whole truth,’ Adrian says abruptly. ‘Those reports you did were compiled by us at the Office in order to be shown to our banks and our investors here in the City. UK plc, if you like. They were compiled in order to encourage our banks, our institutions, Finn, to go into Russia. What you wrote, old boy, though containing much truth, would scare off anyone in their right mind from ever investing over there in a million years. Not good.’

  Adrian sips the wine and it is excellent. Their wine glasses are filled almost to the brim by the pretty Romanian waitress, and Adrian nudges Finn at her inexperience at pouring wine. But when she’s gone with a nervous smile, he continues.

  ‘We reviewed them, the reports, at Joint Intelligence and, I must tell you, they received high praise from everyone. The PM was very pleased. But. But. The PM issued an advice to us to tone them down. He knew we have to get our banks and big companies over there, into Russia. Blair’s advice was right. Probably written by Alastair Campbell, though,’ Adrian adds and laughs.

  But he is not finished yet.

  ‘So. Tone them down we did. For Tone,’ Adrian continues forcefully. ‘Because that was the right thing to do. Like Clinton in ninety-five, Mr Blair is doing the right thing with Russia. We can’t get hung up on the way business is being done over there, we must get on with actually doing business over there. Get me?’

  For Finn, this is a first. He has certainly never heard Adrian heap praise on Clinton and Blair in the same meal, or the same year for that matter. But Adrian has made his point about why Putin must be supported, at apparently any cost-even the falsifying of field reports-and now slices through his steak and kidney pie as if he is partitioning India.

  ‘Vladmir Putin will be very pleased,’ Finn says.

  Adrian halts a second forkful of pie before it reaches his mouth. He puts his knife and fork back on to the plate and looks at Finn. Gone is the camaraderie, the entre nous style of his recent exposition of events, the car journey and the meeting at the house in Hackney. His eyes are black with anger.

  ‘Be very careful, Finn. You’re treading a very thin line indeed. Don’t try me.’ He leans in towards Finn and starts to jab his knife too close to his face. ‘Remember Tony Cardonus? He was with the Office in Bosnia at the end of the nineties. Remember him, do you?’

  ‘No, Adrian, I don’t.’

  ‘Yes you do. Married a German woman,’ Adrian says, without taking his eyes off Finn’s, without even blinking. ‘We pulled him out for rather the same reasons we had to pull you out. Insubordination. We paid him off and he went to live with his German bint in Saxony or somewhere. Then he got chippy. Then he demanded more cash. Then he began to make threats. First of all we turned his house over in Saxony. We took everything we needed, computers, the lot. That apparently didn’t work. So we had to go back and we turned his house over again and really made a mess this time. In fact, they couldn’t even live in it. Then, would you believe it, when he still didn’t back off, his kid got kicked out of the local school, thank you very much. Then Cardonus found he couldn’t get another job. His German bint and their son left him. Know where Cardonus is now? Working behind a bar in the Hamburg red light district. When he can stand up straight enough. Get me? When we came back the third time, we didn’t just do his house in. So don’t try me, Finn.’

  Adrian returns voraciously to his steak and kidney pie.

  Finn describes how, at that moment, he saw the brute in his old recruiter properly for the first time: the ruthless, single-minded streak that had got Adrian through the Malaysian jungle or the Omani desert thirty, forty years before; not wearing a grey suit in a London club, but a breath away from death, and which has propelled him through the Service nearly to the top.

  ‘Not hungry?’ Adrian says to Finn between mouthfuls.

  Finn picks up his knife and fork and eats so that Adrian won’t know how sick he feels.

  ‘You must come down to Wiltshire,’ Adrian says when their plates are clean and he’s pouring the rest of the Burgundy equally between them. ‘Pen would love it,’ he adds, as though it has been some third person who, five minutes before, stopped by the table and issued an explicit physical threat against Finn.

  They adjourn for brandy as a late appearance by the sun sends a streak of light through the windows at the front of the club.

  ‘Pen’s very fond of you, Finn,’ Adrian says, returning to the theme. ‘She and I think of you like…well, like family.’

  Pen is Penny, Adrian’s wife. At various times in the years since Finn has known and worked for Adrian, Penny has been described by Adrian’s contemporaries as ‘first class’, ‘a top girl’ and, once, as the ‘perfect woman’. This has not stopped Adrian philandering in London during the weekdays and maybe that is part of Penny’s ‘perfection’, Finn thinks: her ability to overlook her husband’s behaviour.

  ‘I’d love to,’ Finn says. ‘That’s a very kind offer.’

  ‘I insist you come,’ Adrian says. ‘Pen will call and make a date. Absolutely.’

  And they part company on the club’s steps, a deal done, it seems.

  I get up and walk around the pink house and look through the windows at the back. I check upstairs and look carefully from behind a curtain out on to the street at the front. There is nothing. It snows still, but ther
e is nothing untoward, nothing that alerts me to the presence of unwelcome visitors.

  I keep walking, round and round the house.

  When Patrushev finally told me what my assignment was on that night at the Forest, it was to find our enemy within. So this is it. His codename is Mikhail. Within a few weeks of the evening I spent with Patrushev in Moscow, Finn, in London, is being told by his bosses that this enemy within our ranks at the Forest, Finn’s great source Mikhail, is no good; that Mikhail is a mistake.

  I pick up Finn’s book again. At the end of this meeting with Adrian, he writes just two paragraphs.

  ‘But Mikhail has always been the silken thread of truth. He is so far on the inside that he practically shits in Putin’s bathroom. Mikhail is the greatest source the British ever had in Russia. It is Mikhail who has got me this far.

  ‘It is Mikhail’, Finn writes, ‘who first told me about the Plan, Anna. He is one of them, one of the so-called Patriots, brought down from Putin’s St Petersburg clan. Before that, way before that, he was stationed in East Germany with Putin.’

  This denial of Mikhail by Adrian explains so much of the past seven years. It explains why Finn had to go it alone, go feral, as he puts it. He was fighting his own side as well as ours. Finn never stopped believing in Mikhail. I know that, and the Service didn’t like it at all.

  Most importantly, perhaps, Patrushev’s personal interest in Finn tells me something now, as I read of Adrian’s denunciation of Mikhail. It tells me that Mikhail was…is real, just as Finn knew he was. Why did Adrian lie about Mikhail back then? And what does it tell me about Finn now, wherever he is? Is the identity of Mikhail the key?

  17

  FINN RETURNS HOME that afternoon after his lunch with Adrian. He goes to his apartment in Camden Town, which he’d bought back in the early 1980s and which is now a decaying reminder of the area before it bloomed into its current, wealthy incarnation. For the neighbours, Finn’s apartment is the irritating reminder of where the neighbourhood has come from.

  He goes to bed as soon as he gets home. The drinking at lunchtime, coupled with his lowered defences, overcomes him and he falls into a deep sleep.

  He doesn’t expand on his mood in the days, weeks and months ahead. This period, until the spring of 2001, he deals with in a few paragraphs.

  It is unusual to see Finn disheartened. It is as if for the first, and last, time he is daunted by the odds against him. Adrian has been cunning in telling him the Cardonus story. It is a searing demonstration of pure malevolent power, and that demonstration has come from Finn’s own people.

  He says he communicates with Frank in Luxembourg, who sends him details of the Exodi microfiches from Westbank and their authenticity. And he communicates with Dieter in these dead winter months, and the German adds information to that already supplied by Frank.

  One winter afternoon, sitting at his kitchen table by the window that looks out over a school playground, Finn begins to make notes and this is the turning point. On this nondescript day, when London is reduced to a small grey room, he begins to rise above the contemplation of Adrian’s threats that have shadowed him since their lunch.

  The notes he makes are simple and clear: there is a Plan, conceived by the KGB and nurtured through the ‘dark’ years of democracy in post-Soviet Russia; Putin is the guardian of this Plan and Mikhail its nemesis; the Plan codifies an attack on the West, but one which could not have occurred in the days of Soviet Communism; Exodi, one instrument of this Plan, is a nest of companies into which billions of dollars of laundered money are secreted to the West; the Russians’ agents in the West provide the financial know-how for the Plan; one of the world’s biggest banks illegally allows Exodi to open secret accounts; at least one political figure at the centre of power in Europe protects Exodi. But for what reason does Exodi exist? What are the billions of dollars for? What kind of attack is contemplated?

  I read some of Finn’s coded messages to Dieter, which he has casually left tucked into a book. There are the exotic fungi denoting the different page numbers in the Sasha and Misha stories. The names of these fungi, ‘Emerald Deceiver’, ‘Wolf’s Milk Slime’, ‘Witches’ Butter’, seem to indicate an almost comforting enjoyment in him, a retreat into the safety of fantasy. It is hard not to conclude that Finn enjoys writing these coded communications.

  He stays at his apartment until just before Christmas, without communicating with the outside world.

  He doesn’t say whether he went for Adrian’s weekend to Wiltshire, but he spends Christmas in Cambridge with his uncle and aunt.

  Quietly he begins to work on his own plan as a result of Adrian’s warning. He needs to be more careful now he’s seen the great deceit of Adrian, and the threat behind it.

  He mulls over offers of specialised jobs in the commercial world that suit his talents. There are offers from ex-colleagues who have left the Service in the eleven years since the Wall came down: people who have now set up in private business in smart offices in London’s old clubland around Boodles and White’s and Pratt’s and other obscure gentlemen’s clubs that are scattered through St James’s. These companies are enjoying a rush of profitability from running commercial investigations for large and multinational companies who need privileged information on the ground, wherever they operate in the world. It is an ideal opportunity for a new career for an old spy. And for Finn, a job with one of these companies is cover for what he really means to pursue.

  And so in the New Year of 2001, after talking with various ex-colleagues who have set up these private commercial security companies, Finn finally accepts a job as the Russian expert at a small firm in Mayfair, off Shepherd Market, advising British companies who they are safe to do business with and where. He comes at the invitation of an old Service colleague who’s worked at headquarters in Vauxhall until the middle of the 1990s, and then left dismayed by the lack of attention given to Russian affairs. And as this old colleague points out to Finn, he is now earning five times as much as the Government paid him.

  But Finn is under no illusion that the Service will forget about him or stop keeping an eye on his activities in this new job. In fact, this is the reason for taking the job in the first place; the Service will know where he is, and Adrian will receive reassuring messages about Finn’s new course in life.

  He knows he’s safer if he doesn’t walk off into obscurity, avoid contact, and become a figure in need of special attention. As long as his name is mentioned favourably in the London clubs and at weekend parties in the British countryside, the heat will burn less fiercely.

  And so, after six months’ diligent work in London, with some sanctioned trips abroad for the company-all above board and noted-in the high summer of 2001, he decides to take a holiday.

  But he goes by devious routes and to a part of his life that is secret from everybody- his friends, his uncle and aunt, his former and current employers; anyone, in fact, who has ever known him as Finn.

  In the unlikely event that anyone is watching him, they lose him somewhere near Bishop’s Stortford when his car ‘breaks down’ on the M11, to be towed later to a garage near Stansted airport. Finn walks across open fields, where the harvest is starting to come in, to a lock-up in the Essex town. From the lock-up he takes an old Ducati motorbike and sets off for the Helford River in Cornwall, where nobody knows him as Finn.

  In a quiet creek that slides off to the side of the river, he keeps an ancient, semi-restored wooden pilot cutter that lies in the mud at low tide. The cash hole in his bank statement that represented the purchase of this boat ten years before appeared in his annual accounts back then as ‘gambling debts’, and he was summoned by the Office at the time to receive a warning about it.

  The boat holds some kind of magic for Finn, a man who believes in magic without troubling to enquire too deeply, relying only on some instinct, some sense of its benevolence. But the magic is also more prosaic than Finn cares to admit. He has managed to keep the boat’s existence a secret from hi
s employers, and that is the real magic for him. As his reputation at the Service for recklessness and loose talk grew, Finn was, quite naturally, considered verbally incontinent. How could he have any secrets from them?

  ‘If you choose a mask,’ he once told me, ‘choose one which is demeaning to you, like drunkenness. No one believed Kim Philby was a traitor, because how could a drunk be a successful traitor? What they should have asked was, how could a traitor be a successful drunk? They should have looked at his drunkenness and asked how real it was.

  ‘So if you choose a mask, for whatever reason, choose one which is unflattering, unprofessional, foolish even. Then no one will believe that you’ve chosen it, and no one, therefore, will believe it is a mask.’

  ‘And how do you know’, I asked him, ‘when your mask, your pretence, possesses you and becomes who you are?’

  But I was thinking more about myself than Finn.

  ‘That’s the hardest bit of all,’ he said.

  But thanks to the deliberate foolishness of his mask, Finn’s employers missed the boat, as it were.

  For three days, Finn stays on his boat. It is called Bride of the Wind and named after a painting he loved by Oskar Kokoschka. He rows ashore in the day for supplies from a farm shop situated above the woods along the riverbank and he occasionally visits the chandlery on the other side of the river. The boat is a totem for him, a symbol of freedom, an escape from his other life, from all his other lives.

  I have seen Bride of the Wind, sailed in her. She is tall-masted, long-planked and with a cutaway stern called a lute; her beautiful lines a poem of craftsmanship. In the saloon below decks was a framed, salt-faded print of a poem composed by Oskar Kokoschka’s friend, George Trakl: