Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  ‘There is an alternative, Finn,’ Dieter says, nodding at the woman as they pass.

  ‘What’s that?’

  The path opens out into a wide field where boys are kicking a ball and a young family is trying unsuccessfully to fly a kite.

  ‘Like I told you before,’ Dieter says, talking more urgently now, ‘when you first came. I could have left it all behind twenty, thirty years ago. I could have bought my vineyard, lived a quiet life without the fight. You have more than twenty years on me, Finn. You can still choose to do what I delayed doing.’

  ‘Yes I can,’ Finn replies.

  ‘Why not do it, then?’

  Finn stops and leans on a parapet and watches some boys throwing stones into the river up ahead.

  ‘The same reason you didn’t. I’m not ready yet, Dieter,’ he says.

  Dieter stands behind him, his hands in his pockets.

  ‘You’re right, I wasn’t ready,’ he said. ‘But for what purpose did I carry on? To prove something, maybe? To make something happen? To make a difference?’

  ‘Yes, exactly that,’ Finn says, turning and looking at him. ‘To make a difference.’

  ‘Make a difference to yourself instead, Finn. The world is too big and this world we’ve spent our lives in is too powerful for us.’

  ‘We’re too close to stop now,’ Finn says.

  ‘And the closer you get, the harder it will be,’ Dieter replies. ‘Either you can live a real life away from this, or you can fail, perhaps even die in the attempt, or you can succeed. I don’t know any more than you what will happen. But look at the choices and see which is the obvious one. What do you have to gain by enslaving yourself–and Anna–to the greed and craziness of others?’

  ‘Who asked you to persuade me, Dieter?’

  ‘Nobody, damn you!’

  ‘Have they asked you?’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘The BND. I don’t know. The British, the Israelis, the Russians, anyone.’

  Dieter frowns, whether out of incomprehension or frustration, it is impossible for Finn to guess.

  ‘Listen to me. No one has asked me anything, Finn. I’ve spoken to nobody about this work. But I speak to you now as a friend.’ Dieter suddenly grips him by the shoulders. ‘Turn away, Finn. Give up while you have time. Do what I should have done.’

  ‘Find the name of the trucking company,’ Finn says, looking back into the German’s face. ‘Please, Dieter. And please, find why the five names in the Dresden file are being paid by the Russians.’

  32

  I RETURNED TO LONDON two days after Vladimir had taken me across the border. I was exhausted, beaten, but I didn’t want to rest until I was at my final destination.

  Finn picked me up at the airport and on the way back to his flat I told him everything.

  ‘I’ve left,’ I told Finn. ‘Vladimir turned out to be the good guy.’

  ‘He saved your life,’ Finn said simply. ‘And he saved us.’

  I bitterly regretted that I’d never trusted him, that I’d used him and that, in return for my callousness, he’d rewarded me with his ultimate goodness. I was ashamed and inside I cursed the course of my life and I cursed myself.

  But when we reached his flat and Finn tried to hold me, I pushed him away. It wasn’t just the memory of Vladimir. There were other matters to deal with, not least the pictures of him with Karin which the Forest had shown me. I knew them to be false, but again my knowledge was no defence. I needed to confront him. We were sitting on the balcony of his apartment and watching the last of the tired, grey leaves fall from the trees across the street.

  ‘The night we left each other in Basle,’ I said, ‘did you take the train to Frankfurt with Karin that night?’

  ‘Karin?’ he said.

  I could have thrown him off the balcony.

  ‘The Swiss girl we met in Geneva, Finn,’ I said. ‘That Karin.’

  ‘Oh, that Karin,’ he said.

  It was such a typical response of Finn’s and always a fall-back position for him, even if he had nothing to hide. He did it in order to ponder any question, no matter how trivial.

  ‘Well, did you?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s what they say in Moscow, is it?’

  ‘They showed me a photograph of the two of you. You had the bag with you you’d bought with me the day before in Gstaad.’

  ‘Christ Almighty.’ Finn looked up at the sky, then scratched some peeling paint from the balcony’s railing.

  ‘So did you?’

  He looked me straight in the eyes. ‘Of course I didn’t, Rabbit.’

  ‘Why, “Of course not”?’

  ‘They faked up a photo, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that the answer you know to be true?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He tried to put his arms around me but I pushed him away.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘This is exactly what they want.’

  ‘That’s convenient, too.’

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘That wasn’t all,’ I said. ‘They also provided me with a new background for you that denies everything you’ve said about yourself. Everything you’ve said to me.’

  ‘So what do they say I am now? A trust-fund kid with a stockbroker father and a charity-worker mother living in a Queen Anne hall in Surrey?’

  ‘Pretty much, yes.’

  ‘So their fakes aren’t getting any more convincing at the Forest, then.’

  ‘Which is true?’

  ‘Everything I’ve told you is true.’

  We sat in silence and the first specks of rain began to fall. ‘You’re going to have to think about this,’ he said. ‘You know the answer. Just think about it. Think what’s preventing you from accepting what you know.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  I thought about how our profession allowed the lies and deceit to creep through the rest of our lives until it was hard to know what was true and what was a lie. For a moment I almost wanted my relationship with Finn to have been a fantasy, just to stop the uncertainty.

  ‘Everything is so convenient,’ I said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘What they say, that’s convenient, of course, from their point of view. And your denial, that, too, is convenient. It relies on us both knowing that they are more than capable of faking everything.’

  I let him take me by the shoulders then.

  ‘I love you, Anna,’ he said, and I looked deep inside him. I felt our lives come together with the contact of his hands.

  ‘I love you too,’ I said.

  He grinned.

  ‘Well, that’s all right, then,’ he said.

  We sat in the rain and held each other awkwardly. I knew I couldn’t bear to be without him then.

  In the silence, with just the patter of the raindrops and the steady drone of traffic which becomes, in a city, like a kind of silence, he echoed my thoughts.

  ‘I can’t bear to be without you,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what Nana always said was the only test of love,’ I replied.

  Finn and I went to bed just before midnight. He turned to me in the bedroom, looked me in the eyes, and asked me to marry him.

  It was the most direct question he’d ever asked me and I said yes immediately, without thinking. It was as if someone had asked me if I wanted a glass of water when I was dying of thirst.

  And so Finn and I got married, just as the year 2006 began.

  33

  AT THE END OF APRIL, Finn told me we were to travel to Liechtenstein. He said we should go by separate routes, as we usually did, but I thought that now it seemed like we were two parents who travel separately so that their children aren’t left orphaned.

  I flew to Zurich and Finn to Munich. We were to meet at the Café Sacher in Vaduz, Liechtenstein’s capital, at 4.20 p.m. on 4 May. Failing that, our fall-back plan was to return at staggered hours over the next three days. I don’t know why Finn made these complex arrangements, he never had be
fore, but I should have guessed that he knew he was getting close to danger. I never saw him making a call, doing anything that concerned the Plan, but I guess he was setting up what was to be the final act, out of my sight.

  We met at the time appointed in the Café Sacher, an ancient building which sagged over a cobbled street off the main square in Vaduz.

  Finn had rented a car and after we’d had coffee and some pastries he’d bought at another café–which irritated the proprietor–we walked down the hill to a car park, the closest a car could approach the square. It was a beautiful day though, as Finn said later, there was still a hint in the Alpine evenings of the winter just passed. There’d been a huge snowfall in the middle of April.

  We drove out of the city in the last warmth of a bright, clear afternoon and headed up into the mountains that bordered Germany. It was a beautiful drive. The fair-skinned cattle were cropping the early grass on the Alpine pastures where they would remain until the September transhumance, the ancient tradition which brought them down to the lower slopes. We saw few people, hikers mainly, and one or two farmers in the distance. When we passed two seriously equipped hikers, Finn looked at them in astonishment.

  ‘Whatever happened to stopping for a drink?’ he said, and gesticulated at the hoses connected up to their mouths from their backpack water bottles.

  After driving for more than an hour we were very high up and there were fewer barns and even fewer farmhouses. The road we were taking had now become a dirt track and still we climbed until, in the lee of a ridge, we saw a very old wooden barn, with a wooden house attached to it, made in the days when animals and humans lived together.

  Finn had talked for most of the way. He explained that we were on the last lap that would connect the money that came into the Exodi accounts with its destination, and thus the Plan would be laid out for a child to see, let alone Adrian and the Service. He called Exodi’s purpose, the funds paid from Russia and their destination, the in and out trays. As we approached the last few miles towards the distant farmhouse, he began to tell me why we were here.

  ‘Pablo is a very bad Italian,’ Finn said as he drove, in his usual obtuse way, not explaining who Pablo was. ‘In the early seventies he smuggled dope in a yacht he’d stolen. His regular route was up from Morocco to Holland. He made himself a lot of money and lost most of it gambling and drinking and whoring. But he learned some skills that have been invaluable to us…’ by which I assumed he meant the Service ‘…and, no doubt, to anyone else who paid him the right money. Pablo is a Venetian merchant of secrets. When he was finally arrested by the Dutch police, they made a deal with him and he happily turned in his old drug-running comrades to save his own skin. Then the Dutch appointed him their police drug expert. He was a good choice. Pablo was dealing drugs from the sixties and was the first person I ever met who owned a mobile phone. I remember it. It was the size of a radio set.

  ‘So Pablo was living in Holland, under arrest within its borders, until he’d served his time as their drug expert. The last time I visited him at the end of the nineties, he was testing all the drugs that came into police possession, to check their quality in order for the correct prosecutions to be made. The Dutch had also let him cultivate his own marijuana in greenhouses in the east of the country–legally and for medical purposes only.

  ‘I remember Pablo’s kitchen in Nijmegen, something his police employers never saw. It was full of jars of every kind of drug, and every quality of every kind of drug, that he’d skimmed off the top of the smuggled goods the police had seized.

  ‘But then in 2000 Pablo changed. He’d run his term of being legally confined to Holland and he came to Liechtenstein. His knowledge of how and who to bribe in national police forces turned out to be even more useful than his knowledge of drugs. Somehow he infiltrated his way into Liechtenstein’s financial authority and he is one of the few outsiders who dines regularly with a member of the committee. Pablo’s the reason we’re here.’

  ‘He doesn’t sound very reliable,’ I said.

  ‘He’s completely unreliable,’ Finn laughed. ‘And that’s why he’s so reliable. If you shout down the stairs to Pablo “Where are you?” and he says, “The kitchen”, you can be sure he’s in the bathroom.’

  ‘So why is he so important to us, to where we’re going?’ I asked. ‘Why are you trusting him?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not trusting him,’ Finn said. ‘He’s told me he won’t say a word until I’m out of the country, that’s all. I believe that. But I know that what he’s given me is so important he must be desperate to pass on to someone else my interest in it. So we’ll go straight into Germany after this.’

  ‘Why would Pablo give you anything?’ I asked.

  ‘OK, not given, exactly, of course not, no. He’s the great Venetian merchant. We’ve exchanged what each of us wants with the other. I’ve given him some very valuable knowledge. It would get me thrown in jail if they knew in London I’d done it. No, Pablo never gives anything away. He’ll already be selling my information now, I should think. It’s taken me a long time to set this up,’ Finn added.

  I didn’t ask him what state secret he’d sold to Pablo in return for whatever information brought us here.

  ‘So we’ve come to meet Pablo, have we? Up here?’ I said.

  ‘No. The man we’re meeting is part of the information Pablo’s given me,’ he replied. ‘According to Pablo, the man we’re seeing has hard information that links the KGB and the Russian mafia with their agents in the West. This is where we will find how Exodi works.’

  ‘From a farmer in a barn in the Alps?’ I asked doubtfully.

  ‘That’s right.’ Finn grinned.

  Finally, we came around a wide sweep of track near the top of a grassy mountain which brought us up to the wooden barn and the house we’d seen a while earlier. The track ended here. It was as remote a place as you could find in Western Europe.

  Finn and I got out of the car. There was an old Toyota truck in front of the barn house and a small tractor parked on a grass slope that had animal dung on a rickety wagon behind it. From the open doors of the barn section of the building, we could hear the sound of a welding torch.

  When we walked up to the entrance we saw a man with his back to us, wearing pale trousers, covered in grease and motor oil, and a blue shirt. He was crouched over a piece of red-painted metal on to which he was welding another, similarly shapeless piece of red metal. When the torch stopped and Finn shouted, the man turned, but his face was obscured by a plastic visor. When he lifted the visor I saw he was a man in his late fifties with a face so brown and lined that he looked like part of the old carvings on the barn’s wooden walls.

  He stood still. Then he walked unhurriedly away from the workbench, seemingly unsurprised to have visitors-or maybe unsurprised by anything at all. He came towards the barn entrance, slotting the welding torch on to a metal trolley that held the gas bottle. When he stood in front of us, he slipped the visor off completely. I saw he had a big face; he was a big man, but completely quiet in himself.

  ‘Missed the road?’ he said, in thick, placeless German.

  ‘No. We came to see you,’ Finn said in English and I translated.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘It’s a lonely spot up here,’ Finn said.

  ‘Maybe you want to rent it,’ the man answered in a mocking voice.

  ‘I want to know who rents it,’ Finn said. ‘We’re passing through to the lakes on the other side.’

  This, I knew later, was the phrase which identified Finn to the farmer.

  On hearing the words, the man stiffened and his air of quiet self-sufficiency deserted him. He walked past us, a little closer to Finn than was normal, like a big dog that wants its presence felt among potential rivals.

  He said nothing and Finn and I followed him. He threw the visor on to a table by the door of the house and opened the door on a latch. He left it open and we followed behind him.

  The light was dim inside- the place had
been built against the winter- and we could barely see after the sunshine outside. When my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I saw on another wooden table which looked about a thousand years old, a rifle that was halfway through being cleaned, a hurricane lamp, likewise, and a few empty bottles of beer. The single large room was otherwise sparse. There was no kitchen, or any obvious room at all which could be described as such by an estate agent. There was no electricity. The place was bare but for half a dozen chairs in various states of repair, an old sofa on which a huge wolfhound was lying, and some artfully placed oil lamps.

  ‘You have the money?’ the man asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bring it.’

  Finn left the room and walked to the car. I saw him open the boot and bring out a black plastic briefcase which shone unnaturally in the dying rays of the sunset. As Finn walked back, the man disappeared through a door and by the time Finn was in the gloomy long room, the man was coming back through the door again carrying some beers in the crook of his arm. He snapped the tops off with a Swiss army knife and put them on the table. The beers were very cool, and came, perhaps, from a deep cellar.

  Finn put the briefcase on the table and picked up one of the bottles. The man sat down, without asking us to join him. He opened the case and I could see from the angle at which I was standing, that it was full of bundles of cash. The man counted each row of bundles out in front of us and put them back in the case before counting the next row. When he’d finished, he snapped the lid of the case shut and picked up a beer and sat with his elbows on the table, sipping from the neck of the bottle.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said at last, and gave a low whistle. The wolfhound which had apparently been sleeping came immediately over to the table and sat on the floor beside him. Finn and I pulled up the chairs most likely to survive our weight and sat opposite him.