Red to Black (15 page)

I am about to go to bed in the pink house. It is late, I’m tired and I haven’t found what I desperately want. Can there even be a clue, from all these years back in time, to where Finn is now? I must not be disheartened. I may be Finn’s only chance.

It’s strange being here, with so many of Finn’s things, in a place we never shared, but which has Finn everywhere. I look around the bedroom with its huge and comfortable bed- always Finn’s first preoccupation in a house. There are some novels he has read and I study closely where he thumbed them. There is a second-hand French wristwatch I gave him, an Emerich Meerson- and that he rarely wore because he said it was too beautiful to wear except on special occasions. There are his things in the bathroom- a razor, used, an empty tube of toothpaste which he seems still to have been squeezing long after any toothpaste could be extracted, an airline spongebag. I see his hairs in the razor.

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?

F
INN 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.’

‘Thank you, Adrian.’

‘Your style may not have been to everyone’s taste, but it was to mine. But that doesn’t matter. You achieved great results.’

This time Finn doesn’t reply, but inclines his head slightly to acknowledge such unusually high praise from Adrian.

‘Never mind the way it all ended. It takes nothing away from your achievements, my boy,’ Adrian says.

‘I’m sorry for the way it ended too,’ Finn says, and in this room he means it. ‘For what it’s worth,’ he adds.

But Adrian ignores this, either because Finn’s regret is not actually worth anything to him, or simply because he doesn’t like to be interrupted when he has the floor.

‘So I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Finn,’ Adrian says quietly. ‘It’s come as quite a blow.’ Adrian sweeps back his lank forelock. ‘Finn, I’m afraid Mikhail was a fraud. Has been all along, I’m sorry
to say. It’s come as a great shock to everyone and I know that will include you, above all.’

The young recruit nods slowly and looks down at the table, as if they’re mourning a colleague, as, in a sense, they are.

Finn doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything. He is stunned. He knows exactly what Adrian is saying, who Adrian is talking about.

‘Yes,’ Adrian says cautiously and observes Finn closely. ‘It’s a confusing thing to hear, I agree,’ he continues, injecting a note of sympathy into his voice that fools nobody. But Adrian doesn’t look like a man who’s ever been confused, doubtful or even in two minds about anything in his life.

‘Mikhail has been very useful,’ he continues. ‘A very clever source indeed. And, to us, a very expensive double agent for many years now,’ Adrian says.

Finn watches Adrian’s fingers tap irritably on the table.

‘I’m not saying Mikhail hasn’t provided us with good material, you understand. From time to time,’ Adrian says breezily. ‘Of course he has. That’s why he’s been so bloody successful. He gave us- you’- Adrian flatteringly nods across the table to Finn- ‘some very useful material, valuable both to us and to our friends in Gros-venor Square’ by which Adrian means the Americans. ‘But the big stuff which we- which you too, I know, Finn- set such store by, all this turns out to be the fruits of so much KGB inter-clan warfare and, to be honest, it doesn’t take much light to be shone on it to reveal the flaws.’

Adrian pauses for his peroration.

‘I’m afraid Mikhail allowed this internecine intrigue in the KGB to cloud his judgement on the issues that were most important to us. Mikhail’s been fighting his corner in an internal battle for one KGB clan’s victory over another. In doing so, he’s used us, rather than the other way round.’

Leaning back in his chair and at last stopping the tapping of
his fingers by cradling his hands together across his chest, Adrian sighs.

‘This part of Mikhail’s intelligence-the crucial part-is, to coin a phrase, absolutely useless,’ Adrian finishes with a flourish, joining his fingers in a Gothic arch.

Perhaps Finn is too quick in his acceptance of what Adrian has said, or doesn’t break into the protest of anger or frustration that Adrian expects, for Adrian doesn’t take his eyes off him for a second, searching to see how the news is being received. After all, to Finn and all the other people in the room, Mikhail is the apex of Finn’s career, the source that has sustained him for so long. Finn should be devastated. Mikhail is the reason he was kept in place in Moscow for seven difficult, fraught and dangerous years. To the irritation of the Service’s chiefs, Finn was the only person Mikhail ever agreed to communicate with.

But Adrian is sharp. He sees an uncharacteristic meekness in Finn’s calm that suggests his humble acceptance of this momentous news. And Finn sees in Adrian’s eyes that he doesn’t believe that Finn has bought the story. Adrian knows or suspects that Finn is agreeing for the sake of agreeing and that Finn’s complicity in this extraordinary story that he has just unfolded is not guaranteed.

So he asks Finn to lunch with him, and this is something that wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been pre-planned; Adrian’s diary is stiff with lunches. Adrian doesn’t believe that Finn is really in the loop at all, that he accepts the debunking of Mikhail.

Outside the terraced Hackney house, the two of them step into a waiting grey car that matches Adrian’s suit and are whisked towards the West End.

‘I didn’t want to break this to you quite so abruptly,’ Adrian says, and for once avoids in this statement his habitual abruptness. ‘But you understand it couldn’t really wait. It’s too important. It draws a line under your excellent career, Finn, truly excellent career. I
know now it must seem to be a deeply unsatisfactory line. But it’s not. You’re one of the best officers I’ve ever had, and I mean that as a friend, not just your boss. Right now, I understand, it must seem a terrible blow to you. You’re thinking that those last years in Moscow were wasted. Well, they weren’t. You got hold of a lot of excellent material for us. Perhaps Mikhail was too good to be true. I should have spotted that. That was my mistake, Finn, not yours. You did everything right, everything. You mustn’t beat yourself up about it. I know you won’t, I know you’re too tough for that. You’re one of us,’ Adrian says at last, by which untrue flattery he means, Finn thinks, one of a notional group of exceptional superheroes like Adrian who, camouflaged and with their faces blacked out, go about Her Majesty’s business in the darkest, most dangerous trouble spots of the world.

‘Fancy a walk through the park?’ Adrian says and, without waiting for a reply, barks at the driver to drive under Admiralty Arch and drop them just before the fountain by Buckingham Palace.

They walk up through Green Park, parallel to St James’s in the leafless grey of a London winter day. Adrian is attentive, full of friendship, says how he really wants to see a great deal of Finn, that they have more than just the Service that binds them.

But Finn is still in shock. He says little. His defences are down. Because he knows. He knows that he is being fed a lie and Adrian knows he knows.

They turn into St James’s and enter the white portals of Boodles.

‘Thank God you’re wearing a decent suit,’ Adrian jokes. ‘Some of our new recruits these days! I don’t know if they even possess one.’

They walk through the sitting room of the gentlemen’s club to the small, cosy bar and Adrian greets several other members along the way. Adrian lunches and dines at Boodles with regularity. He lives in the country, but stays up during the week in town and Boodles is his common room.

‘I’ll have a glass of wine,’ Adrian tells the barman, who knows what wine he wants and in what size glass–large. ‘What’ll you have?’ he says to Finn. ‘Something strong, I should think.’