I have seen Bride of the Wind, sailed in her. She is tall-masted, long-planked and with a cutaway stern called a lute; her beautiful lines a poem of craftsmanship. In the saloon below decks was a framed, salt-faded print of a poem composed by Oskar Kokoschka’s friend, George Trakclass="underline"
Over blackish cliffs
Falls drunk with death
The glowing bride of the wind
The blue wave of the glacier.
During these days, Finn paints and varnishes where neglect and weather damage demand. He mends a broken pulley block, replaces some worn-out halyards and services the engine. Fuelled and watered, he leaves the river on a spring tide under the nearly full moon and sails to France, to a little fishing port on the Brittany coast where they love old working boats and where, if you sail in one, nobody bothers to ask for your passport.
He spends the evening with an old aquaintance, a red-headed Breton boat builder, in a tiny, black-tarred fisherman’s bar up the hill from the harbour. After two o’clock in the morning there are just three of them, Finn, the redhead and the moustached patron with a fat belly, who is a grumpy old misanthrope, but who warms up slowly after midnight like a rusty night storage heater. It is into the patron’s spare room that Finn collapses into bed sometime in the early hours.
The next day he catches a series of trains that take him by late evening to the Côte d’Azur.
In August along the coast from La Napoule to Monte Carlo, wealthy Russians, both exiles and those close and loyal to the Putin regime, are displaying their riches and their women in the hotels and casinos, and in the private châteaux and yachts they have bought for themselves in the previous ten years.
But Finn isn’t going south for a summer holiday. He writes just three words on this journey. Building A Network.
18
FOR TWO WEEKS Finn criss-crosses southern Europe, from the Russian châteaux on the Côte d’Azur to private banking halls in Geneva, to a small and poor canton in Switzerland. His final stop, before departing the mainland of Europe on Bride of the Wind as the equinoctial storms set in, is Tegernsee where he discreetly sets up his hideaway in the pink house under the name of a brass-plate company domiciled in the Caribbean, which he had quietly created for himself while working in London. He is laying the ground for the work ahead.
The network he sets up could be described as ramshackle. It consists of one or two angry, self-pitying Russian billionaires, both wanted for imprisonment in Siberia; of money-laundering prosecutors and Swiss bankers; disgruntled KGB agents engaged in clan warfare; foreign intelligence malcontents from various countries; figures from the political fringes of the European Union who’ve been passed over for promotion or who are afraid of where the European Union is treading in its relations with Russia; private investigators, like Frank, who know the ins and outs of Europe’s clearing banks and offshore shell companies; and others on the fringes of the intelligence world, one or two of whom provide a small but significant insight into Finn’s quest, and the rest who talk a lot and say nothing. Many of these contacts have private motives, or grander geopolitical ideas that either crush them under the weight or distort their reason. A few are good, clear, honest people. These Finn treats as family.
He begins on that August night, after a day on trains bound for the south, at a party in Antibes, thrown by an acquaintance from Moscow in the 1990s. Boris Berezovsky, until a little over a year before the senior figure among the seven bankers who ruled Russia, is now firmly in exile in one of his many homes in the West, the grand Château de la Garoupe, where he nurses his dreams of a triumphant return.
On this night, however, Finn isn’t after information. He wants some of this cash that washes the Côte d’Azur more brightly than the phosphorescence on its beaches. What he wants is funding. Here, among the Russians disenchanted with Putin, he will find the cash that will pay for the lease in Tegernsee and fund the subsequent years of his investigations.
But he goes to Berezovsky’s party for a second reason. He knows his presence in the house of Putin’s enemy will filter back to Moscow, the Forest and the Kremlin. Even Berezovsky can’t invite two hundred and fifty guests without there being an informer among them. So Finn goes along to lay the ground for his reunion with me. He wants us, at the Forest, to know exactly where he is. He knows that they will send me after him.
Whether he finds any of the funds he needs from Berezovsky or from one of the many other billionaires, multimillionaires and also-rans at this party- or whether he takes a hat round and gets a sub from more than one of them- he doesn’t say.
But the next night he has dinner at the Hermitage Hotel in Monte Carlo with one of the guests from the night before. He is a Russian oil baron, Gennady Liakubsky, and Finn meets him along with one of Liakubsky’s cronies from the Russian underworld, and another man.
And this is where we at the Forest begin to pick him up on our radar. One of our SVR agents on the Côte d’Azur is a real-estate agent who deals in many of the high-end properties the Russian rich are buying. He has been at the party where Finn appeared and has put a tail on him.
And so I knew Finn was dining with Liakubsky and his mob friends that night.
Within twelve hours we had the photographs of this dinner back with us at the Forest; Liakubsky, in the company of a Russian mafioso recently released from prison and known as Yakutchik- ‘the little Yakut’–and another man, a Russian trader living in Geneva who calls himself Danny.
Finn is sitting at a private table at the Hermitage in Monte Carlo with five waiters for the four of them, who are drinking thousand-dollar bottles of wine decanted and poured by a sixth waiter. Finn is laughing and toasting with a billionaire thief and the best of the Russian underworld.
He’s in his element, relishing this role that will later that night or the next day engender that curious brand of guilt and sorrow that is always mixed with pride.
He’s telling filthy jokes and indulging in the back-slapping bonhomie with the best of them. But it is an unhappy union of a disgraced British spy and two thieves and a murderer, disguised as a convivial supper between colleagues.
‘I am taking their money; money stolen off the backs of the Russian people. These people stole it from other thieves and murderers, but ultimately it comes from the poor, the old, the veterans of war and Communist persecution. It comes from industrial production from the factories and mines and oilfields constructed from the blood and death of Stalin’s slaves. The thousands of pounds’ worth of wine we are pouring down our gullets like Coca-Cola is the blood of those men and women who worked under the lash fifty, sixty years ago to construct an industry which has been stolen from their children and their grandchildren.
‘This is Putin’s great public relations coup- to focus on such thieves as these- while silently seizing their ill-gotten gains, not for the benefit of the people who made it, but for a new set of oligarchs, the KGB, which is now taking shape in the Kremlin.
‘And me? How different am I? Here I am taking their stolen money in order to expose this new crime that I so passionately believe is now unfolding in the Kremlin. So, for me, the means justify the ends too. But do they? For me, but not for anyone else?
‘Sometimes, all we need to guard against is our own pious morality. But it’s hard to see that when you’re sitting at the rich man’s table with a bunch of crooks and killers.’