‘What do you mean, he’s dead?’ Willy said quietly. ‘How is he dead? Killed, you mean?’
Finn picked up a handful of sand and let it slide through his fingers.
‘Frank says he was found in a rental car in a lock-up in Metz across the border. Engine running. He was suffocated by the fumes. The boy couldn’t have afforded to rent a car, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Did Frank say that?’ Willy asked.
‘No, he didn’t.’ Finn paused. ‘He gave me the benefit of the doubt,’ he added bitterly.
‘You didn’t kill him, Finn,’ I said.
‘This is what they do,’ Willy said. ‘You know that. That’s why we fight these people. To prevent them from doing things like this.’
‘A war of prevention,’ Finn said mockingly.
‘Back in the seventies,’ Willy said, ‘when I used to go over the Wall, something that concerned the British was Hungary’s development of nuclear power. The Soviets used Hungarian nuclear facilities to provide Moscow with plutonium. One of my contacts in Budapest, a scientist, didn’t like this arrangement. He gave me much information that filled in the picture for your people in London. The scientist was found in a vat of molten aluminium. It’s a war, Finn.’
‘Your scientist knew what he was doing and took the risk. This boy had no choice.’
‘You say Frank gave you the benefit of the doubt,’ Willy said. ‘There’s no evidence of anyone else being involved. The boy may have killed himself. We don’t know.’
‘They don’t leave evidence,’ Finn snapped.
Willy went to get a bottle of Scotch and we tried to talk to Finn but he was adamant. What Willy and I were both thinking, however, was that the boy’s death confirmed the value of what he’d told Finn.
‘We don’t know what happened,’ I said. I put my arms around Finn and held him close. ‘You have a choice, Finn. You can choose to believe he was killed and you can equally choose to believe he took his own life.’
Finn had a child’s attitude to his work, he’d always told me he had. Maybe we all do in this business. Finn once told me that he enjoyed putting himself in dangerous situations so that he could get out of them. He said that, for him, this was what made life worth living. But he also said it was the attitude of youth. It was the attitude of youthful pursuits, like mountaineering or any extreme sport, which normal people eventually grow out of.
The two of us walked up the beach as the sun sank and merged with the orange sea on the horizon. We didn’t talk for a long time.
The following day, we packed my things–Finn was travelling light–and Willy drove us to Aix-en-Provence in his car. Our farewell to Willy was sombre. Finn made no attempt to be cheerful, or even grateful, in the knowledge, I suppose, that we would be meeting again before long and that a new beginning was never far away. We caught a train and began a series of changes that slowly took us to the West, to Brittany, where Bride of the Wind lay on a mooring in a quiet estuary.
Finn could never be cheerless for long and rebounded from his grief with almost inappropriate speed. But somewhere, deep inside him, I knew that the boy’s death had been filed away, fuel for future action and, perhaps, guilt.
It was a beautiful clear night when we sailed for England, but the cold of autumn was coming in off the Atlantic. I had never been on a boat before and Finn showed me what to do if he should fall off. We sat on deck for most of the night. Finn explained what he had to do from now on, and how he needed my help. It had taken him more than a year to get this far and he knew he was only at the beginning of a long journey.
As dawn broke on the English side of the channel, Finn said, ‘What they’ll do at the Forest in the coming months, years perhaps, is to try to drive a wedge between us. That’s what we have to be most careful of.’
24
I MOVED INTO FINN’S LIFE and his apartment in Camden Town in the autumn of 2001 and so began a long game of manipulation and double lives that was to last nearly four years and in which the only constant, the only truth we knew we could rely on, was each other. Slowly, as we came to see we were both fighting our own sides to maintain our fictions, we became our own sole source of comfort and trust.
For Finn, his fiction, his double life meant diligently pursuing investigative work for the commercial company in Mayfair where Adrian and the Service could keep an eye on him. He cut his hair and wore a suit, he looked more respectable than I’d ever seen him, and we even went, once, to spend a weekend with Adrian and Penny at their country house in Gloucestershire, where Adrian flirted openly with me in front of his wife and asked me questions about the Forest and if there was anything he could do to make my life more comfortable in London–a comment that I took to mean him personally and not the establishment.
Finn and Adrian met from time to time alone so that Adrian could question Finn about my reasons for leaving Russia, and Finn I believe came as close as was possible in this secret world to convincing Adrian that I had left. And Adrian needed too some satisfaction that Finn no longer gave any credence to Mikhail.
Finn also took trips abroad for the company, and on each of these trips, he would fit another piece into the jigsaw, make the picture he was trying to illuminate a little clearer. His feral side now wore a dark suit.
Occasionally, one of his contacts came to London, on other business. Of all of them it was Frank whom I met first. He came over to attend the funeral of a retired ex-Service officer named Haroldson and Frank, Finn and I went together to Mortlake cemetery, where Adrian and a smattering of Service people came to pay their final respects. Adrian was more relaxed with Finn than I’d seen him before, and Finn’s presence at the funeral seemed to reassure him that Finn had come back into the fold.
We took Frank out to dinner afterwards at a restaurant in Soho and I saw the closeness of his friendship with Finn that went beyond any professional necessity. We talked about Frank’s daughters–his wife was dead–and about Frank’s plans for retirement, which sounded similar to Dieter’s, a bucolic dream that seemed to me like the postponement of regret. At the end of dinner, I saw Frank leave his copy of the Evening Standard on the table and I saw Finn pick it up. Whenever they met they were working.
For me, my fiction, my double life, was to drip-feed reports back to Moscow with sufficiently developing information to make my masters appreciate my worth in London. But my main task was to make them believe that Finn still worked for MI6 and that the Service itself, not just Finn, was avidly interested in Mikhail. This was absolutely crucial to my remaining in London. Finn and I both knew that he would become expendable as soon as the Forest believed he was on his own.
We designed these reports so that they would ask more questions than they answered. But of course they had to give away information Finn would rather not have given up. I slowly revealed MI6’s progress with Exodi, with the Uzbekistan connections and General Baseer, with the Luxembourg MP and the secret accounts at Westbank.
The Forest was delighted with Mikhail even though it was just a codename. I heard that a new and special file had been opened on the case and headed ‘Mikhail’.
In this period up to the spring and summer of 2005, Putin built up a hierarchy of power in Russia that harked back to Peter the Great. He won the presidency again in 2004, with such embarrassing ease that Grigory Yavlinsky, the head of Russia’s Liberal party, said, ‘And who invented this system? It used to take a slightly different form, but it was invented by Stalin in the 1930s.’
Slowly, power was drained from the executive, from parliament–the Duma-from the regions, the judiciary, the Federation Council, business and the media. It all found its way into the hands of the siloviki, the men of power, the KGB and its ultimate master Directorate ‘S’.