Tegernsee’s charming medieval streets with their low houses and discreet, expensive shops weave around the lake. Tegernsee, I’m now beginning to see, is also perfect for its geographical position. A short road takes you across the Bavarian Alps to Austria or, a little further, to the old Communist East. A different, equally short route, rides over the Algauer Alps to Liechtenstein, and, further west, beside Lake Bodensee, to Switzerland.
Tegernsee is a place of crossings. It is like some petite and perfect geographical transaction, in which money and secrets are exchanged, with private banks and borders of every kind neatly close at hand.
I walk up the street, on to a pavement beside the frozen lake- the See of Tegernsee- and into the thick warmth of a gasthaus, Finn’s precious exercise book tucked safely into my coat.
It is Saturday night and the place is full of locals. Loud Bavarian music is playing from a band on a small, improvised stage and there is dancing. Bavarian regional dress is everywhere: feathered hats, lederhosen, braces, big boots for the drinkers or patent shoes with buckles for the dancers, and the waitresses wear long white full dresses and colourful, embroidered waistcoats. Bavarian traditions are not reserved for tourists.
I sit at a table by the monumental stone fireplace, flaring its flames and heat from monstrous logs, and order food and wine. And then I open Finn’s ‘book of record’, as he calls it.
13
AFTER FINN’S SHOWDOWN with the embassy’s head of station, he was confined to a room in the building while two thuggish escorts from the Service flew out from London to Moscow. They escorted him to Domodyeva airport to the south of the city and the three of them enjoyed a first-class trip to London, courtesy of British Airways.
They take Finn to a house in Norwood in south London, where he is questioned for nearly two weeks.
It is all routine stuff. First a man called Sanders who says he’s from the Russian Desk, but whom Finn has never met, questions him.
‘We want to know about your Russian girl, your Anna, Finn. She’s had a very successful career so far, a shining career. She’s shot up the ladder, it seems. A full colonel at her age! Does she know? How much of a threat is she?’
‘She’s very dangerous indeed,’ Finn says. ‘And I don’t know what she knows.’
His reply holds up the process for a while and Sanders takes the opportunity to confer elsewhere. When he returns, Sanders is with another man, a junior Finn vaguely knows, and they repeat the question.
‘Look,’ Finn says, ‘she’s dangerous, all right, but only to a good night’s sleep.’
‘How do you feel about her?’
‘Feel?’
‘Do you miss her, Finn? Do you miss Anna?’
‘You can’t miss her.’
‘For God’s sake, grow up, Finn,’ Sanders says angrily.
Then they all leave and some old buffer comes along and reels back the years, with questions Finn was asked when he first joined the Service.
‘Have you or any members of your family ever held any extreme political views?’ this man asks kindly.
It was a question that was asked of people who needed clearance for minor civil service jobs rather than clearance for the security services.
‘Am I being prosecuted, then?’ Finn asks. ‘Is this some kind of prelude for doing me under the Official Secrets Act?’
‘My dear chap, no, no, nothing of the kind.’
But then Finn tells the man he does have a member of his family who has extreme political views.
‘Oh yes?’ the buffer says politely, maintaining perfect calm in the face of this unusual statement. ‘And who is that? What are his or her views, Finn?’
‘My aunt thinks Blair is Jesus Christ,’ Finn says.
At this they’re very angry and don’t see him for two days.
‘Will you try to see her again?’ Sanders asks when they all finally come back. But this time they’ve come back with the big guns, with Adrian, Finn’s recruiter and handler and who’s in line for the top job at MI6.
‘As far as she and I are concerned, it was already ten years past our bedtime when we met,’ Finn says. ‘I was too late. But now it’s finished. No. I won’t try to contact her.’
Adrian then leans across the table and puts his hand on Finn’s arm.
‘She doesn’t know the reason we left you in Moscow all that time,’ he breathes. ‘Does she, Finn?’
It is a blunt and almost threatening statement that has all the subtlety of a pair of thumbscrews.
Finn looks back into Adrian’s ruddy face and answers truthfully.
‘No, Adrian, she doesn’t know that.’
‘It would have been so much easier if you’d told us that at the beginning,’ Adrian says. ‘When we brought you in. You could have saved us and yourself an awful lot of trouble.’
Finn doesn’t reply.
Adrian turns gentle now.
‘You’re home, Finn. You’re home now. You’ve done a fine job. You’ll get over her.’
But Finn doesn’t feel he’s home. And he doesn’t feel he’ll get over ‘her’.
Finn’s superiors and the interrogators who visited him at the house in Norwood never thought that he would defect, with or without the ‘Russian girl’.
‘They wanted to tidy me up, that’s all,’ Finn says. ‘And to get me out of their way. They wanted me safely pensioned off. In their eyes I was a worn-out, washed-up, mentally and emotionally compromised ex-officer, and the only thing that really concerned them was that I would keep my mouth shut and how much I was going to cost them in retirement.’
And suddenly he’s writing straight to me.
‘Anna, I felt you with me in that room in London. I loved you then and I love you now.’
It is just a sentence, but it is the first love letter from my lover to me.
After Finn was let go ‘on a long leash’ from Norwood, he tidied up his affairs and visited his aunt and uncle outside Cambridge. Otherwise he kept a low profile so that the Service could be satisfied he wasn’t about to do anything rash.
‘There are enough dissatisfied former intelligence officers in the world,’ he says, ‘and I don’t want to add myself to the list. I’ve seen them many times, the dissatisfied, men whose careers have ended in anger and resentment and demands for bigger payoffs from the Service, men who think they’re worth more but whose real gripe is the fear of a wasted life for which they believe they should be endlessly compensated by other people, by anybody but themselves.’
In typical Finn style, having established this record of what wasn’t motivating him, rather than what was, he then turns a new page and writes just two words.
The Beginning.
In the late autumn of 2000 Finn let it be known to the Service that he was taking a ‘holiday’. But this holiday wasn’t to a beach on the north African coast or to the cultural treasuries of Italy or the Far East. It was to the unusual destination of Saarbrucken, the old coalmining town, long in decline, on the German side at the junction of the three borders of France, Germany and Luxembourg. He was, as he’d warned me in Moscow, going feral.
Here on a dull, cold November day when the wind was blowing fine, freezing sleet down the River Saar and the grey town and the grey sky were fused into one, Finn met an old German acquaintance from the past, in a cheap Chinese restaurant under a grim post-war office building that ran for two blocks down the Goethestrasse from the river.
In this anonymous dead-end town in a backwater of Germany Finn chose the twelve-euro menu and his contact chose the same, and they kept their silence as two Tiger beers were brought across the grubby red and gold, dragon-painted room with its paper lamps that swayed whenever the door was opened on to the grey, damp concrete outside.