Red to Black (8 page)

‘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.

W
HEN 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 mat
tered 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?

Out of the blue he said, ‘Let’s talk about Finn.’ He simply said Finn. We’d never used anything but Markus.

The other three men in the room looked aghast and then confused. Proper procedure had suddenly been obliterated and they didn’t understand.

I felt my stomach drop and a horrible void open up in its place. I closed my eyes.

As Markus, Finn was always, to me, at a convenient distance in my reports. I was informing on Markus, not Finn. The two had become separated. To me, Markus was almost another person, Finn’s professional doppelgänger. But I understood immediately why Patrushev had dropped this bombshell. We were no longer to talk about a target of Russian intelligence, but about a relationship, mine and Finn’s.

I remember, presumably when I had opened my eyes again, seeing Patrushev watching from the other side of the desk. His face expressed a non-committal curiosity.

‘Yes,’ he said, as if he had seen some answer in my reaction. ‘Let’s talk about Finn.’

And so, for the next hour or so, we talked about Finn, right back to the earliest reports on him, right back to the beginning.

Of course, much of it had appeared already in the dossier, both from before I knew Finn and from my own reports. But Patrushev wanted what was behind the facts. We strayed increasingly from the area of intelligence into assessment.

Looking only at Patrushev, I began to talk about what I knew of Finn’s childhood.

Finn had told me about it on a trip to Irkutsk in Siberia. He was visiting the city to look over a British investment there in his Trade and Industry role and he asked me to accompany him. He had a surprise for me. We arrived in Irkutsk on a bleak afternoon in January when the temperature was minus twenty-five degrees and he went at once to the offices of a gold-mining company, a joint venture between British and Russian investors. It was a Friday. When he returned to the hotel, he said, ‘Now we have the weekend to ourselves, Rabbit. I’ve booked a place up on Lake Baikal. That’s the surprise,’ he said delightedly.

He’d arranged the business trip in order to spend the weekend with me.

We stayed in an old wooden house by the frozen lake, the deepest in the world. The house had been bought by a tycoon in Irkutsk and then modernised, though the only real concession to the modern was central heating and a generator. At night, in bed, it was too hot under the bearskins.

The next day we walked along the cliff below the house and found a way down to the lake. Finn collected up some brushwood and made a fire on the ice.

‘It must be six feet thick at least,’ he said.

‘Be careful,’ I said.

We sat on blankets around the fire and then Finn began to tell me where he was born, about his family and his upbringing.

‘I come from the island of Inishturk,’ he said in a self-mockingly grand way, as if he’d owned the island. ‘It’s on the west coast of Ireland.’

Finn’s Irish connection had always fascinated General Kerchenko as well as my two case officers. In their world view, anyone born in Ireland would surely wish to damage the British Government.

‘The community I was born into was an experiment. I was born into a social experiment, Anna, just like you but in a different way. Inishturk back then was what is known as an “alternative community”. It later morphed into a hippy colony. My mother and father were actually both British but Ireland was the venue for my conception and birth for the simple reason that it was as far from what they called the “rat race” or the “machine” as possible. It still provided some familiarity of culture, I suppose, if only in the climate and the rugged scenery of the North Atlantic.

‘The idea of the community was that everyone played an equal role,’ he said, and stirred the fire with a stick. ‘There were no leaders. Whether your job was cultivating vegetables or chairing what they called community conscience meetings to decide where the community was going, or what was wrong, you were all equal.’

He looked at me with weary amusement and exhaled a stream of cigarette smoke. ‘Sound familiar?’ he said.

I smiled but said nothing.

‘The children all belonged to the community,’ he went on, now staring into the fire. ‘They were not part of their parents. I stayed in most of the stone crofts, which had been renovated in a rudimentary way, at some time or another. The community was more or less under orders to be one happy family. I was taught that my family was the community, and my blood relations were like anyone else.

‘When I was six I was put through an ordeal they called ‘shouting therapy’, which was for my own benefit, of course. I was stood in the centre of a circle while the adults shouted abuse at me and hurled the most vicious personal insults they could come up with; what I looked like, how I talked, my pathetic desire to be close to my mother. It was a ritualistic humiliation. It was very frightening but very organised. I cried. I couldn’t stop crying and they judged that to be good. The purpose of the process was to destroy my self-belief and make me need them more. Equality meant the equality of subjugation.’