Red to Black (17 page)

‘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?

F
INN RETURNS HOME
that afternoon after his lunch with Adrian. He goes to his apartment in Camden Town, which he’d bought back in the early 1980s and which is now a decaying reminder of the area before it bloomed into its current, wealthy incarnation. For the neighbours, Finn’s apartment is the irritating reminder of where the neighbourhood has come from.

He goes to bed as soon as he gets home. The drinking at lunchtime, coupled with his lowered defences, overcomes him and he falls into a deep sleep.

He doesn’t expand on his mood in the days, weeks and months ahead. This period, until the spring of 2001, he deals with in a few paragraphs.

It is unusual to see Finn disheartened. It is as if for the first, and last, time he is daunted by the odds against him. Adrian has been cunning in telling him the Cardonus story. It is a searing demonstration of pure malevolent power, and that demonstration has come from Finn’s own people.

He says he communicates with Frank in Luxembourg, who sends him details of the Exodi microfiches from Westbank and their authenticity. And he communicates with Dieter in these dead winter months, and the German adds information to that already supplied by Frank.

One winter afternoon, sitting at his kitchen table by the window that looks out over a school playground, Finn begins to make notes and this is the turning point. On this nondescript day, when London is reduced to a small grey room, he begins to rise above the contemplation of Adrian’s threats that have shadowed him since their lunch.

The notes he makes are simple and clear: there is a Plan, conceived by the KGB and nurtured through the ‘dark’ years of democracy in post-Soviet Russia; Putin is the guardian of this Plan and Mikhail its nemesis; the Plan codifies an attack on the West, but one which could not have occurred in the days of Soviet Communism; Exodi, one instrument of this Plan, is a nest of companies into which billions of dollars of laundered money are secreted to the West; the Russians’ agents in the West provide the financial know-how for the Plan; one of the world’s biggest banks illegally allows Exodi to open secret accounts; at least one political figure at the centre of power in Europe protects Exodi. But for what reason does Exodi exist? What are the billions of dollars for? What kind of attack is contemplated?

I read some of Finn’s coded messages to Dieter, which he has casually left tucked into a book. There are the exotic fungi denoting the different page numbers in the Sasha and Misha stories. The names of these fungi, ‘Emerald Deceiver’, ‘Wolf’s Milk Slime’, ‘Witches’ Butter’, seem to indicate an almost comforting enjoyment in him, a retreat into the safety of fantasy. It is hard not to conclude that Finn enjoys writing these coded communications.

He stays at his apartment until just before Christmas, without communicating with the outside world.

He doesn’t say whether he went for Adrian’s weekend to Wiltshire, but he spends Christmas in Cambridge with his uncle and aunt.

Quietly he begins to work on his own plan as a result of Adrian’s warning. He needs to be more careful now he’s seen the great deceit of Adrian, and the threat behind it.

He mulls over offers of specialised jobs in the commercial world that suit his talents. There are offers from ex-colleagues who have left the Service in the eleven years since the Wall came down: people who have now set up in private business in smart offices in London’s old clubland around Boodles and White’s and Pratt’s and other obscure gentlemen’s clubs that are scattered through St James’s. These companies are enjoying a rush of profitability from running commercial investigations for large and multinational companies who need privileged information on the ground, wherever they operate in the world. It is an ideal opportunity for a new career for an old spy. And for Finn, a job with one of these companies is cover for what he really means to pursue.

And so in the New Year of 2001, after talking with various ex-colleagues who have set up these private commercial security companies, Finn finally accepts a job as the Russian expert at a small firm in Mayfair, off Shepherd Market, advising British companies who they are safe to do business with and where. He comes at the invitation of an old Service colleague who’s worked at headquarters in Vauxhall until the middle of the 1990s, and then left dismayed by the lack of attention given to Russian affairs. And as this old colleague points out to Finn, he is now earning five times as much as the Government paid him.

But Finn is under no illusion that the Service will forget about him or stop keeping an eye on his activities in this new job. In fact, this is the reason for taking the job in the first place; the Service will know where he is, and Adrian will receive reassuring messages about Finn’s new course in life.

He knows he’s safer if he doesn’t walk off into obscurity, avoid contact, and become a figure in need of special attention. As long as his name is mentioned favourably in the London clubs and at weekend parties in the British countryside, the heat will burn less fiercely.

And so, after six months’ diligent work in London, with some sanctioned trips abroad for the company-all above board and noted-in the high summer of 2001, he decides to take a holiday.

But he goes by devious routes and to a part of his life that is secret from everybody- his friends, his uncle and aunt, his former and current employers; anyone, in fact, who has ever known him as Finn.

In the unlikely event that anyone is watching him, they lose him somewhere near Bishop’s Stortford when his car ‘breaks down’ on the M11, to be towed later to a garage near Stansted airport. Finn walks across open fields, where the harvest is starting to come in, to a lock-up in the Essex town. From the lock-up he takes an old Ducati motorbike and sets off for the Helford River in Cornwall, where nobody knows him as Finn.

In a quiet creek that slides off to the side of the river, he keeps an ancient, semi-restored wooden pilot cutter that lies in the mud at low tide. The cash hole in his bank statement that represented the purchase of this boat ten years before appeared in his annual accounts back then as ‘gambling debts’, and he was summoned by the Office at the time to receive a warning about it.

The boat holds some kind of magic for Finn, a man who believes in magic without troubling to enquire too deeply, relying only on some instinct, some sense of its benevolence. But the magic is also more prosaic than Finn cares to admit. He has managed to keep the boat’s existence a secret from his employers, and that is the real magic for him. As his reputation at the Service for recklessness and loose talk grew, Finn was, quite naturally, considered verbally incontinent. How could he have any secrets from them?

‘If you choose a mask,’ he once told me, ‘choose one which is demeaning to you, like drunkenness. No one believed Kim Philby was a traitor, because how could a drunk be a successful traitor? What they should have asked was, how could a traitor be a successful drunk? They should have looked at his drunkenness and asked how real it was.

‘So if you choose a mask, for whatever reason, choose one which is unflattering, unprofessional, foolish even. Then no one will believe that you’ve chosen it, and no one, therefore, will believe it is a mask.’

‘And how do you know’, I asked him, ‘when your mask, your pretence, possesses you and becomes who you are?’

But I was thinking more about myself than Finn.

‘That’s the hardest bit of all,’ he said.

But thanks to the deliberate foolishness of his mask, Finn’s employers missed the boat, as it were.

For three days, Finn stays on his boat. It is called
Bride of the Wind
and named after a painting he loved by Oskar Kokoschka. He rows ashore in the day for supplies from a farm shop situated above the woods along the riverbank and he occasionally visits the chandlery on the other side of the river. The boat is a totem for him, a symbol of freedom, an escape from his other life, from all his other lives.

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 Trakl:

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.

F
OR 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.’

When I see Finn’s picture at the Forest the day after the dinner, I can hardly contain my excitement. He seems so close and I can feel his plan unfolding. The company he’s keeping doesn’t matter. I forgive Finn more easily than he forgives himself. There he is, the man who a little more than a year ago told me I could say he loved me. I smile again at the memory.

The whereabouts of Finn and these photographs of the company he’s keeping are so important to us that they arrive at the Forest a few hours later. It isn’t Liakubsky we are watching. Or the Little Yakut, just released from an American jail. Or Danny, the Russian trader from Geneva. It is Finn. The Forest is watching Finn in the hope he will lead us to Mikhail.

Gennady Liakubsky is thirty-eight years old. He was born in Komi out to the north-east of Moscow in western Siberia where there is
nothing but tundra and oilfields, great winding rivers and the herds of reindeer that are still taken from one feeding ground to the next by the dwindling ethnic peoples of this inhospitable region.

As a student in the Engineering School in Moscow, Liakubsky had been a part-time informer for the KGB before perestroika in the 1980s. But then he’d seen the opportunity of marrying his qualifications with the new business opportunities that arose in the nineties. He’d traded on the Moscow stock exchange in any commodity he could get his hands on, but always looked east, where Russia’s money is born, to the oilfields and mines that are strewn across the vast, empty Siberian plains ten time zones wide that reach up eventually a few miles from America in the Bering Strait.

When Yeltsin began to auction off the state’s industrial property in 1996, Liakubsky was one of those who seized their chance. He bought oil production in Komi where his local KGB and mafia connections ensured a smooth transition, then branched out into a gold mine outside Yakutsk, the place where he struck up his partnership with the Little Yakut. A coal mine in the Kuzbass region was added, then iron mines, steel foundries and more oil. Like the others, Liakubsky amassed whatever he could get while the going was good. And like the others, he took his profits out of Russia to the West in a financial drain that has cost Russia up to five hundred billion dollars, all told. Bleeding the country was their insurance against the future.

But when Putin came to power in 2000, Liakubsky, unlike Boris Berezovsky, was one of those who prostrated himself to the new power. His château in France was not an exile’s home. He paid and paid the new administration in the Kremlin, he agreed to Putin’s new injunction to stay out of politics, he repatriated Russian art to St Petersburg from all around the world, and supported Putin’s pet projects in Petersburg. It is said he gave over twenty million dollars to the refurbishment of Putin’s home city and its palaces.

But even after all this, Liakubsky could never feel safe, as long
as there were new, more trusted acolytes that Putin wished to put in control of the country’s wealth at the centre of power, in the Kremlin.

We knew at the Forest that Liakubsky, like all of his kind, spent a great deal of his resources amassing
kompromat
-black propaganda–against Putin and his clique. One day, who knows, possession of the President’s secrets, and those of his allies, might be all that stands between Liakubsky and a Siberian prison camp.

But Liakubsky was not alone in this. They all did it, they all still do it, as long as Putin and his KGB clan tighten the noose around Russia’s throat and are the power to be reckoned with. They support Putin’s political party, United Russia, which is now, six years later, the only real party; they pay up when asked. But always, always they continue their search for insurance.

And Finn, for Liakubsky, is just one more agent of his insurance, one brick in the wall of the
kompromat,
the black propaganda the oil baron needs. His financial contribution to Finn isn’t even petty cash for Liakubsky.

But we’re not watching Liakubsky, back at the Forest nor the Little Yakut, with his yellowed Asian features pinched from generations of Siberian cold and his string of murders behind him. Nor Danny the Geneva trader. We are watching Finn and I am being briefed to join with him again and find Mikhail, the enemy within.

After some financial arrangement has been reached with Liakubsky, the next morning Finn takes a train to Annecy. But in Annecy, we lose him. As I read now, I see the trail of Finn’s route at the moment it went dead for us.

Somehow and un-recounted by Finn, he makes his way to the Swiss border and, crossing without a passport through the deserted frontier post above Grenoble, he travels to Geneva.