‘At about two in the morning, I walked home. I had no idea who Adrian actually was, I realised, as I walked through the wet streets. But it didn’t seem to matter. I was glowing at the memory of all these clever people who could make a conversation from anything, and I was impressed by Adrian’s keen attention. “Someone from the Foreign Office” was how he had been described and I didn’t think beyond that. I’d been invited to go on to have a drink with this incredible someone at the Foreign Office. Adrian had such power, Anna. He was the kind of man I’d been looking for. I thought he was someone who could tell me who I was.
‘So, six months later I changed my course at Cambridge to Russian. No one told me to, it was almost a sixth sense. But I changed courses, I realised much later, to please Adrian, even though I hadn’t seen him for more than that one night.’
‘You were looking for a father,’ I say, thinking of my own.
‘I was looking for me,’ Finn replies. ‘I’ve always been surrounded by people, friends, lovers, anyone who cared for me. But the person who was always absent in the room was me.’
We come from different sides, Finn and I, in more ways than one. But this, perhaps, is the most influential difference between us. I have always been running away from my father, to the extent that I’d actually joined the intelligence service in my country as a means to be free from him through exceeding his expectations. Perhaps I fool myself. But Finn, I know, has always been running towards something, blindly, towards his lost identity.
‘You were perfect for Adrian,’ I say.
‘Yes, Anna, that’s the truth of it,’ Finn replies, and there is silence for a while. He finally resumes. ‘I didn’t see Adrian for another two or three years, though. When I left Cambridge I had a first-class degree.’ He speaks the words with some mockery. ‘I travelled to all the places I’d read about, all around the Soviet Union. I wrote articles, short stories and a diary on my travels. I shot a bear with a university teacher in the Caucasus mountains, fished with the Mayor of Yugansk, fell in love with a prostitute in Magadan of all places…I wandered rather than travelled,’ he corrects himself. ‘But as Rilke warns, “Beware, O wanderer, for the road is walking too.”
‘And then one day in Hong Kong, maybe three years after I’d left Cambridge, I was watching the Rugby Seven-a-Sides and there, suddenly, was Adrian standing beside me. I was overjoyed, or relieved, one of the two anyway. He filled up the empty years immediately. I’d have done practically anything for him.
‘Two months later, I started my training and he was always with me after that. I felt like I’d come home.’
On another evening we are sitting at a table at the edge of the restaurant in the sand and Finn talks about Willy.
‘He’s helping me, Anna,’ Finn says. ‘Even at over seventy years old he’s as sharp as anyone.’
‘Isn’t he reporting to London?’ I ask him. ‘Can you trust him?’
‘Oh yes, I can trust him. Willy worked for us for many years. He was one of the best, went over the Wall many times. When he first came to the West he was angry that we’d done nothing to stop Moscow in the Hungarian uprising. But he worked for us in the belief that we were all working on the same brief and that brief included the liberation of his country. But he slowly became disillusioned. He came to believe that no one in London gave a shit about Hungary. He became bitter. He came to hate the Service. But he’s helping me now.’
‘Is he your new Adrian?’ I ask him.
‘No, no.’ Finn smiled and put his hand on mine. ‘I’m finished with that now, grew out of it long ago. But I didn’t know that until recently, until I met Adrian in London.’
Willy joins us and Finn tells him I am to be trusted, despite being Russian. And then, over plates of calamari and a bottle of excellent Condrieu, Finn finally edges on to the subject that has lain dormant for the past few days and which, from time to time, I’ve felt is only a bad dream, something unreal. But Finn speaks in a carefully low-key, non-dramatic way for once, so it seems like we are talking about something that is manageable, something normal. He is laying down what he has been doing in the past year when we’ve been apart.
‘I need to tell you about some companies,’ he says out of the blue one evening. ‘They’re called Exodi. They are the key to everything. They are the key to our freedom too, you and me. When we find what Exodi exists to do, this will be over. I promise you.’
He tells me- Willy obviously knew it all before–what he’s found from Dieter, what Frank finally told him, with some additions from the Troll.
‘Frank has done a lot of research into the companies,’ he says. ‘But first, perhaps, I should tell you the preamble.’
As Finn speaks he draws lines beside the table in the sand with a stick and occasionally makes a letter. Sometimes a bigger wave eradicates a national border, or a line of communication, and this is appropriate in the context. He is drawing a map of connections that stretch from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, into Transdnestr–the independent territory inside Moldova that was, and is, still loyal to Russia–and then on to Bulgaria and Serbia and further still to a bank in Liechtenstein; the connections wind on from Liechtenstein to Luxembourg and the bank Westbank and then a branch line runs sideways into a box set of companies in the Cayman Islands.
‘This small element of the story, the story so far, starts in Afghanistan,’ he starts to explain, pointing his stick at the top of the map. ‘General Baseer in northern Afghanistan is just one starting point of three, we believe, for Exodi’s funds. Though I doubt he’s ever actually heard of Exodi himself. Baseer’s an Uzbek Afghan. Ally to the Americans, foe to the Russians way back. But that’s just political manoeuvring. Principally he’s just another warlord with interests that take precedence over any marriage of convenience with whatever great power happens to be passing his way at the time. The funds for his power and for his army come from the poppy, of course. With the Taliban in power in Afghanistan, Baseer and the other warlords are finding that their traditional business is hard; heroin is not on the menu under Taliban rule. But they still manage to produce a reduced crop of poppies, mainly in the inaccessible valleys in the north of the country, which is Baseer’s area of control.
‘Well, as an Uzbek Afghan he has excellent connections through family and clans across the border in Uzbekistan that are far stronger than any political line drawn on the map, or any alliance with the Americans. His chief ally there, as perhaps you know, is Uzbeddin Cherimov, the great trader and backer of the Uzbek president. Between Cherimov and the president, the Uzbek KGB was nicely finessed into doing what it does best, facilitating the drugs trade and taking a cut before the line of graft moves up further to Moscow’s mafia and KGB interests.
‘Cherimov is more the international figure in a small group, which includes Uzbekistan’s president and General Meklikov, the old KGB general from Moscow who coordinates from the Forest all the drugs and arms movements through Uzbekistan. The three of them met, in fact, at the Silk Route Hotel in Tashkent last month, 15 August. That’s a national president, Meklikov, a KGB general and Cherimov, a drug baron. Quite a useful gang. It was a regular meeting between the three of them for the division of spoils and future planning.
‘But it’s Cherimov who travels beyond borders the most out of the three. He always has. He’s been a Russian Olympic representative for nearly twenty years; travels everywhere under the Olympic flag. He has a mansion outside Tashkent where all the servants are former athletes. He also has a cotton business that exports from the Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan out to Western Europe and ultimately to America. The main port for the final leg is Brest in France. Originally the heroin went hidden in cotton bales, but now it uses different routes. Through Bulgaria, Serbia, Austria and down into Italy, it is now transported in refrigerated trucks, with the correct baksheesh chucked in the direction of customs officials. The trucks aren’t opened at the borders, the excuse being that it would destroy perishable produce; it’s tomatoes and fruit on the manifest.