Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  For nearly three days we say nothing about the reason I’m here and slowly the burden of it recedes. Finn ensures that we concentrate just on ourselves. We talk a lot about the distant past, about where we’ve come from, things that aren’t recorded in Finn’s file we kept at the Forest, things we never knew. And I respond with little stories of my own upbringing. It is like the games we used to play in Moscow, teasing each other with what we knew about the other, except that these are revelations, background that neither of us knew before, and we aren’t taunting each other with them any more.

  Finn tells me one evening how he was recruited, or at any rate how they made the initial moves towards his eventual recruitment. He speaks about the past, as we all often do, as if it is something from another life altogether and he was another person then. And I suppose, in Finn’s case more than most, he was another person back then.

  ‘At the beginning of my second year at Cambridge, I was invited to supper by a gay French professor who drank much too much whisky,’ Finn says on this evening, and a smile plays around his eyes at the memory. ‘I remember on one occasion he chased me round his flat begging me to allow him to beat me with a hardback copy of Balzac’s Passion in the Desert.

  ‘I didn’t particularly want to accept his invitation to supper. But I was flattered to be asked, even though the reasons for it were fairly obvious. He was always inviting pretty men to his rooms. And I was always easily flattered, Anna,’ Finn says, looking into my eyes so that I see right through them. ‘Even alcoholic pederasts with only one thing on their minds had the power to flatter me in those days, as long as I sensed there was the prospect of mixing with those in high places, or of lifting myself away from my past, or of getting away from myself as I knew me.

  ‘I was hugely impressed by the fantasy of Cambridge as it seemed to me then, and always in my mind I referred back to the commune in Ireland to reassure myself of how far I’d come. I was always looking for something and expecting to find it in the admiration of others. I needed people to be interested in me. So I accepted his invitation and went to high table at Magdalene College on a wet Friday evening, as usual looking for someone or something to tell me who I was.

  ‘There was a full table, about twenty or so of us, and afterwards we went to the French don’s rooms for a bottle or two of port. In our party there was the professor of Philosophy from Oxford, Freddie Ayer, the playwright Tom Stoppard, a Russian specialist from London University, the French don and me.

  ‘The sixth person was Adrian. I remember Freddie Ayer and Tom Stoppard talked for nearly an hour about how far away from earth the Virgin Mary would be now if she’d been travelling at the speed of light. It was bizarre, funny, exciting, stupid, and, most of all, different. It was my fantasy of how university life should be.

  ‘As usual I wanted to be like the people I was with. But all of them, not one individually. I thought I could piece myself together with bits of everybody, like a jigsaw. As usual I wanted to be everybody and felt nobody. I’ve always been good at being whatever the person I’m talking to at the time wants me to be. They like that, in the Service.’

  Finn picks up a stone and throws it beyond the edge of the lazy surf and the ripples shimmer in the moonlight. It seems to me like a gesture of controlled anger, anger at his own behaviour when he was a young man and had been the blotting paper that soaked up the admiration and, perhaps worse, the suggestions of others.

  ‘Anyway, I performed as usual,’ Finn says. ‘And as usual I felt I was at the centre of everything, of the universe itself, and at the same time completely apart. I immersed myself in the talk that went around the room, trying to impress, and apparently I did. At the end of the evening, Adrian offered me a lift back to my college, but we went and had a drink at his hotel instead. He asked me how I was enjoying my course and wouldn’t it be better to do something rather more useful than Classics. Some living languages, for example.

  ‘At about two in the morning, I walked home. I had no idea who Adrian actually was, I realised, as I walked through the wet streets. But it didn’t seem to matter. I was glowing at the memory of all these clever people who could make a conversation from anything, and I was impressed by Adrian’s keen attention. “Someone from the Foreign Office” was how he had been described and I didn’t think beyond that. I’d been invited to go on to have a drink with this incredible someone at the Foreign Office. Adrian had such power, Anna. He was the kind of man I’d been looking for. I thought he was someone who could tell me who I was.

  ‘So, six months later I changed my course at Cambridge to Russian. No one told me to, it was almost a sixth sense. But I changed courses, I realised much later, to please Adrian, even though I hadn’t seen him for more than that one night.’

  ‘You were looking for a father,’ I say, thinking of my own.

  ‘I was looking for me,’ Finn replies. ‘I’ve always been surrounded by people, friends, lovers, anyone who cared for me. But the person who was always absent in the room was me.’

  We come from different sides, Finn and I, in more ways than one. But this, perhaps, is the most influential difference between us. I have always been running away from my father, to the extent that I’d actually joined the intelligence service in my country as a means to be free from him through exceeding his expectations. Perhaps I fool myself. But Finn, I know, has always been running towards something, blindly, towards his lost identity.

  ‘You were perfect for Adrian,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, Anna, that’s the truth of it,’ Finn replies, and there is silence for a while. He finally resumes. ‘I didn’t see Adrian for another two or three years, though. When I left Cambridge I had a first-class degree.’ He speaks the words with some mockery. ‘I travelled to all the places I’d read about, all around the Soviet Union. I wrote articles, short stories and a diary on my travels. I shot a bear with a university teacher in the Caucasus mountains, fished with the Mayor of Yugansk, fell in love with a prostitute in Magadan of all places…I wandered rather than travelled,’ he corrects himself. ‘But as Rilke warns, “Beware, O wanderer, for the road is walking too.”

  ‘And then one day in Hong Kong, maybe three years after I’d left Cambridge, I was watching the Rugby Seven-a-Sides and there, suddenly, was Adrian standing beside me. I was overjoyed, or relieved, one of the two anyway. He filled up the empty years immediately. I’d have done practically anything for him.

  ‘Two months later, I started my training and he was always with me after that. I felt like I’d come home.’

  On another evening we are sitting at a table at the edge of the restaurant in the sand and Finn talks about Willy.

  ‘He’s helping me, Anna,’ Finn says. ‘Even at over seventy years old he’s as sharp as anyone.’

  ‘Isn’t he reporting to London?’ I ask him. ‘Can you trust him?’

  ‘Oh yes, I can trust him. Willy worked for us for many years. He was one of the best, went over the Wall many times. When he first came to the West he was angry that we’d done nothing to stop Moscow in the Hungarian uprising. But he worked for us in the belief that we were all working on the same brief and that brief included the liberation of his country. But he slowly became disillusioned. He came to believe that no one in London gave a shit about Hungary. He became bitter. He came to hate the Service. But he’s helping me now.’

  ‘Is he your new Adrian?’ I ask him.

  ‘No, no.’ Finn smiled and put his hand on mine. ‘I’m finished with that now, grew out of it long ago. But I didn’t know that until recently, until I met Adrian in London.’

  Willy joins us and Finn tells him I am to be trusted, despite being Russian. And then, over plates of calamari and a bottle of excellent Condrieu, Finn finally edges on to the subject that has lain dormant for the past few days and which, from time to time, I’ve felt is only a bad dream, something unreal. But Finn speaks in a carefully low-key, non-dramatic way for once, so it seems like we are talking about something that is manageable, something no
rmal. He is laying down what he has been doing in the past year when we’ve been apart.

  ‘I need to tell you about some companies,’ he says out of the blue one evening. ‘They’re called Exodi. They are the key to everything. They are the key to our freedom too, you and me. When we find what Exodi exists to do, this will be over. I promise you.’

  He tells me- Willy obviously knew it all before–what he’s found from Dieter, what Frank finally told him, with some additions from the Troll.

  ‘Frank has done a lot of research into the companies,’ he says. ‘But first, perhaps, I should tell you the preamble.’

  As Finn speaks he draws lines beside the table in the sand with a stick and occasionally makes a letter. Sometimes a bigger wave eradicates a national border, or a line of communication, and this is appropriate in the context. He is drawing a map of connections that stretch from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, into Transdnestr–the independent territory inside Moldova that was, and is, still loyal to Russia–and then on to Bulgaria and Serbia and further still to a bank in Liechtenstein; the connections wind on from Liechtenstein to Luxembourg and the bank Westbank and then a branch line runs sideways into a box set of companies in the Cayman Islands.

  ‘This small element of the story, the story so far, starts in Afghanistan,’ he starts to explain, pointing his stick at the top of the map. ‘General Baseer in northern Afghanistan is just one starting point of three, we believe, for Exodi’s funds. Though I doubt he’s ever actually heard of Exodi himself. Baseer’s an Uzbek Afghan. Ally to the Americans, foe to the Russians way back. But that’s just political manoeuvring. Principally he’s just another warlord with interests that take precedence over any marriage of convenience with whatever great power happens to be passing his way at the time. The funds for his power and for his army come from the poppy, of course. With the Taliban in power in Afghanistan, Baseer and the other warlords are finding that their traditional business is hard; heroin is not on the menu under Taliban rule. But they still manage to produce a reduced crop of poppies, mainly in the inaccessible valleys in the north of the country, which is Baseer’s area of control.

  ‘Well, as an Uzbek Afghan he has excellent connections through family and clans across the border in Uzbekistan that are far stronger than any political line drawn on the map, or any alliance with the Americans. His chief ally there, as perhaps you know, is Uzbeddin Cherimov, the great trader and backer of the Uzbek president. Between Cherimov and the president, the Uzbek KGB was nicely finessed into doing what it does best, facilitating the drugs trade and taking a cut before the line of graft moves up further to Moscow’s mafia and KGB interests.

  ‘Cherimov is more the international figure in a small group, which includes Uzbekistan’s president and General Meklikov, the old KGB general from Moscow who coordinates from the Forest all the drugs and arms movements through Uzbekistan. The three of them met, in fact, at the Silk Route Hotel in Tashkent last month, 15 August. That’s a national president, Meklikov, a KGB general and Cherimov, a drug baron. Quite a useful gang. It was a regular meeting between the three of them for the division of spoils and future planning.

  ‘But it’s Cherimov who travels beyond borders the most out of the three. He always has. He’s been a Russian Olympic representative for nearly twenty years; travels everywhere under the Olympic flag. He has a mansion outside Tashkent where all the servants are former athletes. He also has a cotton business that exports from the Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan out to Western Europe and ultimately to America. The main port for the final leg is Brest in France. Originally the heroin went hidden in cotton bales, but now it uses different routes. Through Bulgaria, Serbia, Austria and down into Italy, it is now transported in refrigerated trucks, with the correct baksheesh chucked in the direction of customs officials. The trucks aren’t opened at the borders, the excuse being that it would destroy perishable produce; it’s tomatoes and fruit on the manifest.

  ‘The northern route goes through Ukraine by rail. There’s over a hundred thousand acres of farmland in Ukraine in a single block that’s owned ultimately by Russian and Ukrainian mafia bosses and overseen by the KGB. In the centre of this land is a railway station, away from prying eyes. Here all the exports are repackaged and sent on under different bills of lading.

  ‘Cherimov’s been a target of Western agencies for years and I don’t know why he’s still free. He was thrown out of Australia at the last Olympics. Last month he was arrested in Paris, but here’s the strange thing. He wasn’t put in jail or charged with anything at all. He and his cronies were escorted to the Belgian border in three limousines in the dead of night by a team of French police motorcycle outriders. He walked free in Belgium. He is, it seems, untouchable.

  ‘He stayed in Brussels for three days at a very nice apartment out in the diplomatic area, where the European Commission people can rub shoulders with the world’s diplomats. The apartment belongs to a close friend of Putin, a Russian foreign policy adviser at the European Union.’

  Finn pauses and Willy walks over to the bar and brings three beers and some bread and cheese he has bartered for his fish. Willy smiles at me, even though I’m Russian.

  ‘The Exodi companies,’ Finn continues, ‘are a money-laundering operation for these drug sales. They are also laundering money for certain KGB-controlled arms sales that don’t go via the usual KGB routes and, for one reason or another, need to be even further beneath the parapet. There’s a lot of cash. In the Exodi companies and others we’ve yet to reveal completely, it seems we’re talking about more than twenty-eight billion dollars.

  ‘For drug sales in the West, there are a number of ways the cash is moved, then laundered. Exodi in Paris provides a security service for some less-than-mainstream national airlines. Each pair of security officers on each plane carries a bag for clothes to wear at the other end. Except the bag isn’t full of clothes, it’s full of cash. Suitcases full of cash that pass through airports all over the world, every day of the year, because they’re being carried by airline security officers.

  ‘Anyway, whatever way the cash is moved it’s finding its way to Exodi in Liechtenstein which has an account in Vaduz under the name of Fartrust. It’s a trust account with several signatories, including Cherimov’s. The account has various companies behind it, registered in the Caymans.

  ‘But here’s the strangest thing: only a small proportion of the money goes to the Caymans. Of the twenty-eight and a half billion dollars that was in this Liechtenstein account at the start of this year, only about thirteen million has found its way to the Caymans. Hundreds of millions are going to the Banque Leman in Geneva and at least another hundred million has found its way either directly, or via the Banque Leman, to another Swiss bank in the poorest canton in Switzerland, the Banque Montana in the canton of Valais. The rest must be scattered in these banks or others like them; we don’t know yet.

  ‘Exodi Geneva is the mover of these funds, while Exodi in Luxembourg opens another account at Westbank but it is a secret account with no published account to back it up legally. Much of the money, I’m sure, is there. Frank, whom I told you about, has found that in one of the Exodi Luxembourg’s secret accounts in Westbank there’s another one and a half billion dollars, or thereabouts.

  ‘And here’s the great thing, the jackpot perhaps. Frank believes that a great deal of money also passes into this account from Russian state companies: oil and regular arms exporters, diamonds, and others. This money is being mixed with the mafia drug money from Cherimov. It’s all in the same fund. Russian state company funds and Russian mafia money all in the same bed together.’

  Finn claps his hands together to indicate this perfect marriage.

  ‘You have been busy,’ I say and he smiles.

  ‘So. Now you’re here we need to look further,’ Finn says to me. ‘I need your help.’

  ‘They did tell me you only wanted to use me,’ I reply.

  ‘They’re absolutely right. But first we have to talk.’


  As if he has been silently asked to do so by Finn, Willy gets up from the table and goes over to the bar where he begins to busy himself with things his barman would normally have done.

  Finn stands up and holds out his hand.

  ‘Why don’t we go for a walk,’ he says.

  We walk for maybe a mile up the dark beach in the opposite direction to Marseilles’ industrial smokestacks. Finn holds my hand, a little too tightly I think. He is tense. Out at sea the lights of a big yacht imperceptibly move along the coast keeping pace with us. There is little wind and we can just hear its motor.

  Once we are beyond the area around Willy’s little enclave there is nobody apart from a couple of kids smoking dope and staring dumbfounded at the stars, and we soon leave them behind.

  Finally, Finn loosens his hand from mine and gestures for us to sit down on the beach. We sit close together. The nights are nearly as warm as the days. Our knees touch and we look out at the yacht with its faraway lights.

  ‘Did they tell you why they were sending you?’ Finn says at last.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘You have a source, Finn, that’s what they said. It’s the highest priority to them. To us,’ I add, and wonder how I’m going to square all this with myself.

  I look at him then.

  ‘It seems you’re not just the amiable joker you seem to be,’ I say. ‘It seems this source lies at the very heart of Moscow’s plans and he’s all yours.’

  ‘The Plan,’ Finn says.

  ‘Yes. The Plan. Patrushev knows now.’

  Finn pauses and picks up a shell and seems to study it.

  ‘Do they know about Mikhail?’ he says.