‘What I’m saying,’ Adrian taps the table, ‘is that, while the reports you did were damn good, they gave us exactly the wrong message.’
Finn is momentarily taken aback by this hairpin turn in Adrian’s line of thought.
‘They gave us the true message,’ Finn counters finally.
‘The truth is not always the whole truth,’ Adrian says abruptly. ‘Those reports you did were compiled by us at the Office in order to be shown to our banks and our investors here in the City. UK plc, if you like. They were compiled in order to encourage our banks, our institutions, Finn, to go into Russia. What you wrote, old boy, though containing much truth, would scare off anyone in their right mind from ever investing over there in a million years. Not good.’
Adrian sips the wine and it is excellent. Their wine glasses are filled almost to the brim by the pretty Romanian waitress, and Adrian nudges Finn at her inexperience at pouring wine. But when she’s gone with a nervous smile, he continues.
‘We reviewed them, the reports, at Joint Intelligence and, I must tell you, they received high praise from everyone. The PM was very pleased. But. But. The PM issued an advice to us to tone them down. He knew we have to get our banks and big companies over there, into Russia. Blair’s advice was right. Probably written by Alastair Campbell, though,’ Adrian adds and laughs.
But he is not finished yet.
‘So. Tone them down we did. For Tone,’ Adrian continues forcefully. ‘Because that was the right thing to do. Like Clinton in ninety-five, Mr Blair is doing the right thing with Russia. We can’t get hung up on the way business is being done over there, we must get on with actually doing business over there. Get me?’
For Finn, this is a first. He has certainly never heard Adrian heap praise on Clinton and Blair in the same meal, or the same year for that matter. But Adrian has made his point about why Putin must be supported, at apparently any cost-even the falsifying of field reports-and now slices through his steak and kidney pie as if he is partitioning India.
‘Vladmir Putin will be very pleased,’ Finn says.
Adrian halts a second forkful of pie before it reaches his mouth. He puts his knife and fork back on to the plate and looks at Finn. Gone is the camaraderie, the entre nous style of his recent exposition of events, the car journey and the meeting at the house in Hackney. His eyes are black with anger.
‘Be very careful, Finn. You’re treading a very thin line indeed. Don’t try me.’ He leans in towards Finn and starts to jab his knife too close to his face. ‘Remember Tony Cardonus? He was with the Office in Bosnia at the end of the nineties. Remember him, do you?’
‘No, Adrian, I don’t.’
‘Yes you do. Married a German woman,’ Adrian says, without taking his eyes off Finn’s, without even blinking. ‘We pulled him out for rather the same reasons we had to pull you out. Insubordination. We paid him off and he went to live with his German bint in Saxony or somewhere. Then he got chippy. Then he demanded more cash. Then he began to make threats. First of all we turned his house over in Saxony. We took everything we needed, computers, the lot. That apparently didn’t work. So we had to go back and we turned his house over again and really made a mess this time. In fact, they couldn’t even live in it. Then, would you believe it, when he still didn’t back off, his kid got kicked out of the local school, thank you very much. Then Cardonus found he couldn’t get another job. His German bint and their son left him. Know where Cardonus is now? Working behind a bar in the Hamburg red light district. When he can stand up straight enough. Get me? When we came back the third time, we didn’t just do his house in. So don’t try me, Finn.’
Adrian returns voraciously to his steak and kidney pie.
Finn describes how, at that moment, he saw the brute in his old recruiter properly for the first time: the ruthless, single-minded streak that had got Adrian through the Malaysian jungle or the Omani desert thirty, forty years before; not wearing a grey suit in a London club, but a breath away from death, and which has propelled him through the Service nearly to the top.
‘Not hungry?’ Adrian says to Finn between mouthfuls.
Finn picks up his knife and fork and eats so that Adrian won’t know how sick he feels.
‘You must come down to Wiltshire,’ Adrian says when their plates are clean and he’s pouring the rest of the Burgundy equally between them. ‘Pen would love it,’ he adds, as though it has been some third person who, five minutes before, stopped by the table and issued an explicit physical threat against Finn.
They adjourn for brandy as a late appearance by the sun sends a streak of light through the windows at the front of the club.
‘Pen’s very fond of you, Finn,’ Adrian says, returning to the theme. ‘She and I think of you like…well, like family.’
Pen is Penny, Adrian’s wife. At various times in the years since Finn has known and worked for Adrian, Penny has been described by Adrian’s contemporaries as ‘first class’, ‘a top girl’ and, once, as the ‘perfect woman’. This has not stopped Adrian philandering in London during the weekdays and maybe that is part of Penny’s ‘perfection’, Finn thinks: her ability to overlook her husband’s behaviour.
‘I’d love to,’ Finn says. ‘That’s a very kind offer.’
‘I insist you come,’ Adrian says. ‘Pen will call and make a date. Absolutely.’
And they part company on the club’s steps, a deal done, it seems.
I get up and walk around the pink house and look through the windows at the back. I check upstairs and look carefully from behind a curtain out on to the street at the front. There is nothing. It snows still, but there is nothing untoward, nothing that alerts me to the presence of unwelcome visitors.
I keep walking, round and round the house.
When Patrushev finally told me what my assignment was on that night at the Forest, it was to find our enemy within. So this is it. His codename is Mikhail. Within a few weeks of the evening I spent with Patrushev in Moscow, Finn, in London, is being told by his bosses that this enemy within our ranks at the Forest, Finn’s great source Mikhail, is no good; that Mikhail is a mistake.
I pick up Finn’s book again. At the end of this meeting with Adrian, he writes just two paragraphs.
‘But Mikhail has always been the silken thread of truth. He is so far on the inside that he practically shits in Putin’s bathroom. Mikhail is the greatest source the British ever had in Russia. It is Mikhail who has got me this far.
‘It is Mikhail’, Finn writes, ‘who first told me about the Plan, Anna. He is one of them, one of the so-called Patriots, brought down from Putin’s St Petersburg clan. Before that, way before that, he was stationed in East Germany with Putin.’
This denial of Mikhail by Adrian explains so much of the past seven years. It explains why Finn had to go it alone, go feral, as he puts it. He was fighting his own side as well as ours. Finn never stopped believing in Mikhail. I know that, and the Service didn’t like it at all.
Most importantly, perhaps, Patrushev’s personal interest in Finn tells me something now, as I read of Adrian’s denunciation of Mikhail. It tells me that Mikhail was…is real, just as Finn knew he was. Why did Adrian lie about Mikhail back then? And what does it tell me about Finn now, wherever he is? Is the identity of Mikhail the key?