I’m too tired, but can I afford even a few hours’ sleep? How much time do I have? Who else will find this house and how long will it take them?
16
FINN WAS BACK in London on the first Eurostar train from Paris the following morning. He was taken, almost forcibly, at Waterloo station by two look-outs from the Service who picked him up without breaking step and marched him to a car, the two of them standing a little too close to him all the way until they were sitting in the back, one on either side, and the man on the right had given the driver an instruction. Finn was caught off balance by the reception, but unsurprised.
They returned not to the house in Norwood but to another Service safe house in Hackney. They drive in silence, Finn making no attempt, for once, to poke fun or to undermine his own situation.
It is a once-elegant house with chipped white cornicing and broken steps that lead up to it, and with weeds sprouting from the basement steps. The neighbours are plumbers and poets, actors, waitresses and the unemployed.
Finn is escorted up the broken steps a little too fast for comfort and, once the door is secured behind him, down some stairs inside the house which have peeling white banisters, until he finds himself half pushed, half guided into a room with a steel door and without windows.
Standing behind a desk and talking into a mobile phone is Adrian, the head of the Moscow desk and always Finn’s handler. He has been Finn’s mentor since the beginning and maybe, too, his substitute father.
With Adrian is a new young Russia recruit just out of Oxford who reminds Finn of himself, back in 1989, being taken to witness the interview with Schmidtke at Belmarsh prison. There is also a woman whom Finn hasn’t met but who, it transpires, speaks good German. The room is bare but for three chairs, the desk and a metal box containing routing equipment and perhaps a scrambling device fixed to the wall at the back
Finn is offered a chair and the handlers are sent back upstairs, one to find a fourth chair. He is then told to wait outside the door ‘in case we need you’, as Adrian puts it ominously.
They sit down. Finn is in front of the desk, and his three colleagues sit opposite, almost like a respectful interview committee, except that Adrian is picking his teeth with a toothpick. The woman speaks first. She asks Finn in German where he’s been, who he’s seen, why he’s gone to Germany.
Finn speaks of a visit to Frankfurt, on his way to the Hartz Forest, where’s he’s been enjoying the hiking.
‘Why are we speaking in German?’ he asks Adrian, but Adrian hasn’t finished with his teeth, as though they may play a part in the proceedings.
They know much, Finn observes, but from the line of questioning, he hazards a guess that they don’t know about his meeting with Dieter or his trip to Luxembourg.
‘Been frisked?’ Adrian suddenly asks. ‘Have they gone through all your hidden pockets?’ he adds sarcastically.
‘Your boys took everything I have, Adrian,’ Finn says.
‘Which is what?’
‘Nothing much except a Eurostar ticket and some money,’ Finn answers. ‘And a bag of dirty clothes.’
He has cached the box that Dieter gave him somewhere, before returning to England.
‘No receipts from some nice gasthaus in the forest, then?’ Adrian says. ‘No train ticket from Frankfurt?’
‘Nothing, no. I was on holiday. I only keep stuff I can put against tax.’
‘Convenient,’ the Oxford recruit says, and receives a look from Adrian of such histrionically exaggerated admiration that it mocks the boy and reduces him, as intended, to blushing silence.
They’re angry that he’s gone abroad against their friendly but explicit instructions. Adrian has an energy pumping off his body that would melt a small snowfield. Finn knows Adrian’s rage without observing anything. Adrian feels let down, too, he guesses.
So Finn tells them he’s been clearing his head, walking in the Hartz Forest, near the old border, saying goodbye to his old life.
They didn’t believe him, but what could they do.
‘Why didn’t you go walking in the Pennines?’ the young recruit is emboldened to ask him.
‘It’s not next to the Iron Curtain,’ Finn says.
‘Neither is the Hartz Forest,’ the recruit says, a little too quickly. ‘Not any more. Not for eleven years, since eighty-nine.’
Finn shrugs. ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he says.
And then the real purpose of his abduction from Waterloo station enters the proceedings. In a carefully timed pause, Adrian, the Desk head, old friend, and Finn’s long-time ‘spiritual’ adviser, looks up at him and loosens his tie, as if they are all enjoying a balmy spring morning. He snaps the toothpick in two.
Adrian, as Finn describes him, is a red-faced man of middling height, who wears an ordinary-looking grey suit, white shirt, red tie. Finn says Adrian wears red ties because they dampen the glow of his well-lunched face, which has the jolly ruddiness of the Laughing Cavalier, he says. Adrian is an abrupt, sharp and, on the face of it, jovial fellow, coming to the end of a long and distinguished career at the Service—with still the possibility of the ultimate promotion—and, before his Service career began, a leading figure in Military Intelligence. He’s served in the SAS in several of the British postcolonial wars in Africa, the Middle East and the Far East, but still had the time after they were all finished to rise very nearly to the top of SIS, or MI6, whichever you prefer.
Finn told me once that early on in their relationship he’d asked Adrian what he did in his spare time at his country house. Pheasant shooting, perhaps?
‘When you’ve shot as many darkies as I have,’ Adrian informed him, ‘banging away at the odd pheasant doesn’t really cut the mustard.’
But Adrian hides behind this façade of military bluster. It is an artificial construct that lulls others into a belief that his mind is less acute than he sounds. For behind the barked sentences and the politically incorrect sentiments lies a mind as sharp as a mussel shell. And Finn agrees with this estimate. Finn has a great admiration for Adrian’s intellect, if nothing else about him, and he wouldn’t have had if his boss were a fool.
Adrian recruited Finn and there exists between them that special relationship that exists between a recruiter and his subject; like a father Adrian has sought to make Finn in his own image, but like a proud father, too, he admires the differences between them. When Adrian recruited Finn, Finn was Adrian’s shapeless clay, whom he has sought to fashion into a worthy object of his attention. If Finn has let Adrian down with his recent Moscow debacle, Adrian doesn’t show it.
But-so easy to forget-Adrian is also completely ruthless. His generally jovial bonhomie is a convenient disguise for that. Finn was scared at the beginning of his time in the Service of getting on the wrong side of Adrian and he has cultivated a sufficient, though cunningly insubordinate, friendship with Adrian so that finally Finn believes he has manoeuvred Adrian into the role of older brother rather than father.
Either way, he has let Adrian down now and Adrian doesn’t like anyone to let him down.
And so now, at the house in Hackney, Adrian loosens his tie, undoes the top button of his shirt and reaches the reason for his presence at this otherwise routine telling-off of a wandering ex-intelligence officer.
‘You’ve been a good officer, Finn,’ Adrian says, so gently it puts Finn on his guard. ‘Very good. Exceptional. Your work in Moscow could have been done by no one else, in my opinion. Extremely sensitive stuff and well handled from start to finish. I’m very proud of you.’