AFTER FINN’S SHOWDOWN with the embassy’s head of station, he was confined to a room in the building while two thuggish escorts from the Service flew out from London to Moscow. They escorted him to Domodyeva airport to the south of the city and the three of them enjoyed a first-class trip to London, courtesy of British Airways.
They take Finn to a house in Norwood in south London, where he is questioned for nearly two weeks.
It is all routine stuff. First a man called Sanders who says he’s from the Russian Desk, but whom Finn has never met, questions him.
‘We want to know about your Russian girl, your Anna, Finn. She’s had a very successful career so far, a shining career. She’s shot up the ladder, it seems. A full colonel at her age! Does she know? How much of a threat is she?’
‘She’s very dangerous indeed,’ Finn says. ‘And I don’t know what she knows.’
His reply holds up the process for a while and Sanders takes the opportunity to confer elsewhere. When he returns, Sanders is with another man, a junior Finn vaguely knows, and they repeat the question.
‘Look,’ Finn says, ‘she’s dangerous, all right, but only to a good night’s sleep.’
‘How do you feel about her?’
‘Feel?’
‘Do you miss her, Finn? Do you miss Anna?’
‘You can’t miss her.’
‘For God’s sake, grow up, Finn,’ Sanders says angrily.
Then they all leave and some old buffer comes along and reels back the years, with questions Finn was asked when he first joined the Service.
‘Have you or any members of your family ever held any extreme political views?’ this man asks kindly.
It was a question that was asked of people who needed clearance for minor civil service jobs rather than clearance for the security services.
‘Am I being prosecuted, then?’ Finn asks. ‘Is this some kind of prelude for doing me under the Official Secrets Act?’
‘My dear chap, no, no, nothing of the kind.’
But then Finn tells the man he does have a member of his family who has extreme political views.
‘Oh yes?’ the buffer says politely, maintaining perfect calm in the face of this unusual statement. ‘And who is that? What are his or her views, Finn?’
‘My aunt thinks Blair is Jesus Christ,’ Finn says.
At this they’re very angry and don’t see him for two days.
‘Will you try to see her again?’ Sanders asks when they all finally come back. But this time they’ve come back with the big guns, with Adrian, Finn’s recruiter and handler and who’s in line for the top job at MI6.
‘As far as she and I are concerned, it was already ten years past our bedtime when we met,’ Finn says. ‘I was too late. But now it’s finished. No. I won’t try to contact her.’
Adrian then leans across the table and puts his hand on Finn’s arm.
‘She doesn’t know the reason we left you in Moscow all that time,’ he breathes. ‘Does she, Finn?’
It is a blunt and almost threatening statement that has all the subtlety of a pair of thumbscrews.
Finn looks back into Adrian’s ruddy face and answers truthfully.
‘No, Adrian, she doesn’t know that.’
‘It would have been so much easier if you’d told us that at the beginning,’ Adrian says. ‘When we brought you in. You could have saved us and yourself an awful lot of trouble.’
Finn doesn’t reply.
Adrian turns gentle now.
‘You’re home, Finn. You’re home now. You’ve done a fine job. You’ll get over her.’
But Finn doesn’t feel he’s home. And he doesn’t feel he’ll get over ‘her’.
Finn’s superiors and the interrogators who visited him at the house in Norwood never thought that he would defect, with or without the ‘Russian girl’.
‘They wanted to tidy me up, that’s all,’ Finn says. ‘And to get me out of their way. They wanted me safely pensioned off. In their eyes I was a worn-out, washed-up, mentally and emotionally compromised ex-officer, and the only thing that really concerned them was that I would keep my mouth shut and how much I was going to cost them in retirement.’
And suddenly he’s writing straight to me.
‘Anna, I felt you with me in that room in London. I loved you then and I love you now.’
It is just a sentence, but it is the first love letter from my lover to me.
After Finn was let go ‘on a long leash’ from Norwood, he tidied up his affairs and visited his aunt and uncle outside Cambridge. Otherwise he kept a low profile so that the Service could be satisfied he wasn’t about to do anything rash.
‘There are enough dissatisfied former intelligence officers in the world,’ he says, ‘and I don’t want to add myself to the list. I’ve seen them many times, the dissatisfied, men whose careers have ended in anger and resentment and demands for bigger payoffs from the Service, men who think they’re worth more but whose real gripe is the fear of a wasted life for which they believe they should be endlessly compensated by other people, by anybody but themselves.’
In typical Finn style, having established this record of what wasn’t motivating him, rather than what was, he then turns a new page and writes just two words.
The Beginning.
In the late autumn of 2000 Finn let it be known to the Service that he was taking a ‘holiday’. But this holiday wasn’t to a beach on the north African coast or to the cultural treasuries of Italy or the Far East. It was to the unusual destination of Saarbrucken, the old coalmining town, long in decline, on the German side at the junction of the three borders of France, Germany and Luxembourg. He was, as he’d warned me in Moscow, going feral.
Here on a dull, cold November day when the wind was blowing fine, freezing sleet down the River Saar and the grey town and the grey sky were fused into one, Finn met an old German acquaintance from the past, in a cheap Chinese restaurant under a grim post-war office building that ran for two blocks down the Goethestrasse from the river.
In this anonymous dead-end town in a backwater of Germany Finn chose the twelve-euro menu and his contact chose the same, and they kept their silence as two Tiger beers were brought across the grubby red and gold, dragon-painted room with its paper lamps that swayed whenever the door was opened on to the grey, damp concrete outside.
Finn doesn’t trust the man who sits opposite him, but he likes him and would like to be able to trust him.
‘A good German,’ as Finn puts it, his tongue firmly in cheek. And then, more thoughtfully, ‘Dieter is someone who looks beyond the narrow tunnel walls of his job. He thinks for himself, he sees the world moving outside the avenue of his own efforts, and that is why perhaps, like me, he eventually lost his job.’
Finn has known Dieter since 1989, from the time when the British seized Schmidtke at Tegel airport in Berlin, and whisked him to London. Dieter was one of the BND intelligence officers who formally received Schmidtke back into the bosom of German justice when the British bowed to Germany’s insistence that he was theirs.
I think Finn thought of Dieter as being an inappropriate introduction for me, unlike most of his sources. It wasn’t just that Dieter was uninterested in women, but simply that it would have made him uncomfortable to sit down and break bread with an officer of the Russian SVR. Finn never said so, but I felt his reluctance in Dieter’s case came from the fact that Dieter could not compromise with an enemy who had not only enslaved the East of his country but who had also corrupted so much of what was good in the West. Unlike the British and the Americans, Dieter had been fighting the KGB on the front line.
Sometimes I’ve thought that Dieter was an invention of Finn’s. But here he was, written on the page; a ghost, but a living ghost of our past.
Dieter is a tall, slightly stooped man with black hair thinning and greying at the sides. He has a sharp, lean face, and a dark stubble shadows the pale skin of his jaw. He rarely smiles, but seems to carry a burden of solemnity that leaches from his expressionless eyes into the slope of his shoulders and the movements of his hands. He speaks tonelessly, as if giving a statement to disbelieving interrogators.
He joined West Germany’s intelligence service, the BND, at the start of the long post-war years of reformation. While the world watched Germany rise from the ashes and saw its industry thrive and dominate, its foreign service, the BND, and its army, unlike its automobiles and electrical goods, were forbidden from going abroad. By constitutional decree, its spies could not spy beyond its borders.
And during all that time, for decades, the East loomed across the Wall, porous only to those sent specifically by us in Soviet Russia-us the West’s enemies-to infiltrate, to corrupt and to threaten West German political figures and the country’s financial and commercial institutions.
‘For our allies,’ Dieter once explained to Finn, ‘for you, the Wall was the front line in the war against Communism, the stark divide. But for us West Germans the Wall was far less clearly defined and permanent. For us, it was not some remote battleground, far from home, but a false wall, a partition in our semi-detached existence as one country. The dream of unification, of a greater revived Germany, never died on either side of the Wall,’ he explained. ‘The desire for communication with the East was overwhelming. We were all Germans.’
Finn raises the bottle of Tiger beer without bothering to pour it into the glass and Dieter responds.
‘Cheers,’ the German says in English.
‘Cheers, Dieter. It’s been a long time.’
‘More than ten years,’ Dieter replies.
Finn studies the face of his old colleague. It is a lived-in face, the eyes those of a man who has taken in more than he has given away.
In his early years with the BND Dieter had seen the Wall go up. The enemy and his German cousins were one and the same. But as a German whose adulthood emerged from the shadows of the Nazi war, he’d learned reserve, kept his own counsel, and seemed to Finn shy and wounded.
‘Nazism didn’t just end,’ Dieter had told Finn, ‘like the curtain coming down on a play. The Nazi migrations after the war sought to keep the flame alive, not just in the well-documented places like South America and other remote parts, but closer to home too. An SS officer who was a friend of my father’s went to Turkey, for example, because it was far enough away from retribution while still being close enough to get a decent bottle of wine.
‘And closer than Turkey there was Liechtenstein, just across our border. Did you know the population of Liechtenstein doubled at the end of the war? Oh yes. It was largely a German and Austrian migration, for anyone from the Nazi regime who possessed the necessary loot and influence.’
For Germans like Dieter, determined to remove the stain of their country’s recent past, the totalitarian mindset of the ex-Nazis, whether across the southern border in Liechtenstein or elsewhere, was closer to that of the East German regime than to the new West Germany. Ideological differences between Communist and ex-Nazi were irrelevant to the trade that could be done between two former hated enemies.
‘Totalitarianism, like money, is not squeamish about whose bed it shares,’ Dieter had said to Finn.
After the British had handed Schmidtke over to the Germans, Dieter had been one of Schmidtke’s interrogators for the next two years, until the investigation into the old Stasi spy was quietly dropped and Schmidtke retired to Tegernsee with a good pension and the protection of his former enemies. Dieter wasn’t happy with the deal and lost his job for being unable to come to terms with it.
A waitress brings menus to the table.
‘I want to go back to the beginning, Dieter,’ Finn says, when they’ve drunk half their beers. ‘I need to see the unbroken line from back then, from 1961, to the present.’
‘What makes you think the line is unbroken?’ Dieter replies.
Finn doesn’t answer.
The soup arrives, another beer is ordered. And then Dieter slowly begins to talk, as if he were having difficulty with the memories. But Finn knows he is like an old actor who’s played a part so many times in the private theatre of his own head that the lines will never leave.
‘When Kommerzielle Koordinierung—KoKo—was set up in East Berlin, just on the other side of the Wall in 1961, their motto was “Necessity has no law”,’ Dieter begins. ‘It was a thieves’ decree. Jewellery, artwork, stamp collections, antiquarian books—anything of value belonging to East German citizens—it was all on KoKo’s menu. But this was state theft and, while some objects of value were simply stolen, in general the state and their Stasi agents applied the classic bureaucratic, totalitarian state methods of theft.
‘To give you an example, Finn, people were told they had to insure their property, such as jewellery, for outrageous sums which they couldn’t afford. When they failed to do so, the property was confiscated. That was one method. The value of a citizen’s private property was hugely inflated by KoKo, in order to inflate the insurance value, simply for the purpose of rendering its owners unable to pay. Sometimes Schmidtke’s men inflated the value by 1,000 per cent. Then, when the owners couldn’t pay, or their persecutors simply tired of this longer bureaucratic route, the agents of KoKo would invoke the so-called Fortune Law that existed in East Germany and that said it was illegal to possess property of such a high value. The state could claim that the private citizen had broken the Fortune Law that regulated the private wealth of citizens.
‘Huge numbers of private homes in East Germany were raided by the Stasi. I have walked with an old man after the Wall came down along the pawn shops and the second-hand shop windows of West Berlin, looking for a smart Swiss wristwatch that was taken from him right at the beginning of this grand theft. He never found it, but others have sometimes found their stolen property since eighty-nine, tucked away in a street market somewhere.
‘The state raked in fifty million Deutschmarks a year from thefts like this and it went on for more than twenty-five years, though with decreasing returns, of course. The East Germans were hard up. There was an embargo in the West on the export of technology. In the East they needed to fund their own technological development.’
‘And their own intelligence operations in the West,’ Finn interrupts.
‘Certainly, their own operations in the West, many of which concerned precisely the theft of technological secrets. And this theft was mainly from us, in West Germany. So, in the beginning, KoKo stole the valuables, sold them to West Germans and then used the money to bribe West Germans in particular for industrial secrets. But they also used Raubgold, this stolen wealth, to corrupt our bankers, politicians, even us in intelligence. A lot of money was available for bribing West Germans.’
‘Schmidtke told us that KoKo used a holding company as cover, to keep up appearances,’ Finn says, remembering. ‘Art and Antiquities GmbH it was called, if I remember rightly. It sounded very sound, very proper. Dealers in London did business with it all the time. The company, one removed from KoKo, enabled buyers to turn a blind eye.’
‘Oh yes,’ Dieter says. ‘The two Germanys proved that crime pays,’ he says. ‘To both sides.’
‘And Schmidtke was the great bureaucrat in charge.’
‘Schmidtke was the head of KoKo, he organised this Raubgold. And, in doing so, he learned many more valuable things. He learned how companies worked offshore, how the lawyers handle that side of things, which lawyers could be tempted on our side, how tax worked and was avoided, how to launder wealth, which banks were open to corruption. We were complicit here in the West, or at least many, many individuals in powerful positions were complicit. And all the time Schmidtke had the Stasi and the KGB to back him up with threats if anyone looked as if they might step out of line on our side. Some were willing, of course, but others were compromised with threats and blackmail. Politicians, bankers and businessmen were sexually compromised in KGB sting operations, for example. And Schmidtke had lawyers in Luxembourg and Liechtenstein and Geneva; he had bankers in all three countries, and he had politicians, too, here in Germany and elsewhere.’
Dieter sips from his glass as the soup bowls are removed and he lights a cigarette.
‘And this network of Schmidtke’s,’ Finn says. ‘You spent two years investigating it.’
‘Just over two years,’ Dieter replies, as if remembering a bad holiday. ‘But it was vast and complex, hidden behind wall after wall of trusts and false company names. Two years was what it took just to peel back the edge of the carpet on Schmidtke’s network in the West. And then? Then my government didn’t like what it saw appearing from under the carpet and covered it up again.’
‘So…’
‘So I was retired, along with some others, after a decent time lapse from the investigations. We were being wound up individually, just as the investigation was being wound up. They didn’t want us around any more, with our knowledge, in the same room as them.’ Dieter sniffs. ‘And they were afraid of our indignation that the file was being closed. I finally left in 1992 and they rolled the carpet safely back over the rotting stench.’
Dieter looks at Finn. The handsome eyes in the lined, outdoor face sharpen.
‘But of course you are not interested in the robbery of German citizens,’ he says.
‘I’m interested in their persecutor who sits in Tegernsee with a government pension,’ Finn says. ‘I’m interested in why the investigation of Schmidtke’s network was wound up, and in the network itself. I’m interested in the unbroken line from those times to these.’
‘I’ve always thought you were honest, Finn.’ Dieter pushes aside a half finished plate of noodles. ‘I’ve met some of the victims and they are, sure, just victims of theft. They haven’t been murdered or put in camps, their relatives weren’t shot going over the Wall. But they lost out too.’
‘You did your job.’
‘And you? Are you doing your job, Finn?’
Finn doesn’t reply.
‘I think not,’ Dieter says. ‘Or you wouldn’t be talking to me, a retired intelligence officer, like this in private.’
They split the bill and walk to a car park across the bare concrete platz outside the restaurant. The wind creeps through the thread of Finn’s coat and into his bones.
‘So you want the unbroken line from the beginning to the present,’ Dieter says, demanding no reply. ‘You believe something remains of Schmidtke’s network. Of course,’ he says, and Finn isn’t sure what Dieter means.
They get into Dieter’s old blue BMW and turn out through the car park’s barrier and head west along the banks of the Saar.
‘Let me show you what I’ve bought with my retirement bonus, Finn. Or is it my hush money?’ Dieter adds. ‘I’m not as comfortable in retirement as Schmidtke, but I like it nevertheless.’
Outside the town, when the decayed remnants of its mining past have disappeared from view and been replaced by the slow grey-green curves of the Moselle River as it meanders through wooded hills, they come to an unmade track that leads down to the river. Dieter drives the BMW carefully over the rough ground and pulls up the car in a courtyard of stone barns and outhouses, out on their own. They sit in the car with the engine switched off.
‘Do they know, in London, that you’re here?’ Dieter says.
‘No.’
Dieter seems to weigh the implications.
‘Good,’ he says at last. ‘We shouldn’t trust our masters too much, don’t you think?’ Then he snaps open the door and steps out on to the hard ground.
They walk away from the buildings and up the slope of a vineyard with a view down on to the river. It is bitterly cold on the top of the hill and the vines have been clipped down for the winter and protected with straw around their roots. A small fire made from old vine roots puts up a plume of smoke a few fields away.
‘I bought fifty hectares with my lump sum,’ Dieter says as they walk. ‘I sometimes wonder why I didn’t do it back then, back in the fifties, when I could have made my life as a farmer perhaps, with my own wine label.’
A long, slow barge creeps upriver against the current. On the other side, the forests of Luxembourg cloak the hills.
‘These things are better as dreams,’ Finn says.
‘Perhaps so, yes.’
Finn looks at Dieter but sees no resignation, no sense of failure, in the German’s face. He sees someone who has fought the long, slow battle of intelligence all his life, has seen his enemies rehabilitated, enriched even, while their victims either lie dead or are impoverished. But he sees, too, a face which tells him that the battle has been worth fighting nevertheless.
They walk back down to the banks of the river, their shoes coated with heavy mud, and Dieter indicates that they should walk left up the bank and towards the outbuildings which are half a mile away now.
‘Germany was divided, yes,’ Dieter says, as if to himself, ‘but it was divided only for its ordinary citizens in the practice of their everyday lives. That much I saw when we investigated Schmidtke and long before, of course. The Wall was a metaphor as well as a physical thing. It was a political statement. It hit hardest at the ordinary people, not at those with the power and deceit to use it. For those with power and money, and the matchless amorality to exploit it, the Wall was in some ways convenient. For them, the division of Germany was not an obstacle, but a challenge. They didn’t try to physically overcome it, of course, like the many victims of the border guards, but in other ways, through banks and finance, with corrupt lawyers and secret trusts and secret contacts. The Wall sharpened the wits of these people. Over there,’ Dieter points across the river to Luxembourg, ‘and here in Germany and in Liechtenstein and Switzerland, the avenues of finance are always open, Wall or no Wall. In the battle between capitalism and totalitarian communism, capitalism ate its holes in this metaphorical Wall, like lice in the beams of an old house. Until the whole thing was rotten. Money- capital- is like water. It will always find its equilibrium. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from the East or West, it will come together, and it did. It is the ultimate power. It was our weakness in the West, this primitive accumulation of capital, as Marx put it. It opened our doors to every dictator, every brutal regime in the world.’
‘How did it come together, Dieter?’ Finn asks urgently. ‘East and West. What did you learn from Schmidtke?’
‘What did we start to learn.’ Dieter corrects him, and stops walking and turns to look at the river. The barge is approaching level with them, its small bow wave sending thin lines of brown water out from behind it.
‘I can give you three things, Finn,’ Dieter says at last. ‘I can give you a man, a bank and a company. These are just a brief glimpse, a dirty peephole into a large network that is more complex, more closely bound than the guts of a golf ball. Some would say this network is inextricable. As my masters eventually decided,’ he adds drily.
‘But not you, Dieter.’
‘Everything is possible,’ Dieter says. ‘Our enemies knew that and we should be proud enough to know it too.’
They walk back from the field towards the buildings and Finn realises they’ve made the detour so that Dieter can establish who he is now, a retired agent, a viticulturalist. Dieter is making a statement about his present life.
They reach the first of the outbuildings where the car is parked and then Finn sees that there is a small house hidden from the track between them and the river. He is cold and sees Dieter is too. The German fumbles with numbed hands for a key and opens the door to the house and they enter. It is too cold to take off their coats even in the small, low kitchen, and Dieter switches on the central heating and puts logs into a wood burner and lights it while the heating grumbles into action. He puts a pot on the stove and makes coffee and pours two glasses of good Napoleon cognac and, by that time, the wood stove is kicking out a good heat and they remove their coats.
‘The name of the man is Otto Roth,’ Dieter begins. ‘Or sometimes he’s Osvald Roth, or Rottheim, or any number of variations. What’s for certain is that none of these is his real name. Even he probably hasn’t used his real name for so long it’s meaningless. We’ll call him Otto Roth. Nor is his true nationality certain. Some say he is originally a Russian-German, like Schmidtke, but born on this side of the divide. Some say he is Scandinavian, but that his parents were from Russia and worked in the thirties for the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. In this theory, Roth’s parents came to Western Europe before the war, maybe during the Spanish Civil War, and were placed as sleepers in the West, to be used some day in the cause of Russia. If so, it was their son who turned out to be the gold seam of Russian intelligence and the investment made in the thirties was perfect. So the Russians have always played a very long game, so long that Roth’s obscurity was assured.’
Dieter lights a cigarette and sips from the glass of cognac.
‘Roth was born in 1939, in Antwerp where his parents were passing through. At least that’s what it says on his birth certificate. We believe he has four brothers, younger than him, and an older sister. A brood of sleeping agents, perhaps? I don’t know for sure. If that is so, we don’t know with absolute certainty if any of them are alive, what happened to them in the war, virtually nothing, in fact. We do have our suspicions, however, which I will tell you in a while. They are suspicions which were nipped in the bud when our investigation of Schmidtke was terminated. At any rate, now Roth is a citizen of Switzerland and lives in considerable comfort in Cologny, a very wealthy suburb of Geneva. They say the lawns around his mansion are clipped with scissors,’ Dieter says. ‘But you know of Roth, of course, Finn, so what about him?’
Dieter answers his own question before Finn can speak. ‘At the beginning of the sixties he became a trader, mainly in sugar, and was based in London for a while. Then he disappears. When we next hear of him, he’s trading small arms. He’s in Africa, the Far East, Oman. And then it grows, this arms business of his, and Roth is connected to a shipment of artillery, then spares for warplanes, oil, armoured personnel carriers, you name it, but it all originates from East Germany, most of it with KoKo’s implicit stamp on it, exported out of Rostock. Rostock was Schmidtke’s Stasi-controlled port. And Schmidtke had the goods stamped with false declarations and false destinations.’
Dieter looks hard at Finn. ‘How much do you know of Roth?’ he asks.
‘Go on,’ Finn says.
‘All right. Roth and Schmidtke are by now as close as brothers,’ Dieter says. ‘Roth travels back and forth to the Soviet Union under the cover of a Swiss sporting organisation. The usual cover. He gets himself on to an international committee of Olympic target shooting. Roth’s little joke. The cover is good for him, as it is for many others in the years of the Cold War.’
Dieter gets up from his chair and puts a pot on the stove for more coffee and pours two more nips of cognac, but now he continues his story without a break.
‘That’s Roth,’ he says. ‘We’ll come back to him in a while.’
Dieter sees that the coffee has run out and scrabbles in a cupboard for a jar of instant coffee that has, Finn sees, congealed with age and dampness around the rim.
‘And then there’s the bank,’ Dieter says. ‘It is called Jensbank and it was founded before the war in a little town in northern Bavaria called Fürth; the town where Henry Kissinger was born, as it happens. After the war, and after the Wall went up, Jensbank was one of very few that operated in both East and West Germany. Most people don’t know that there were banks operating on both sides of the Wall. Well, there were. As I say, the Wall was a metaphor, an abstract in many ways, certainly not as solid as people think.
‘Jensbank had more than three hundred branches, on both sides of the Wall. Many were concealed under different names, of course, but they were all Jensbank. And Jensbank dealt in very large funds indeed. Our investigations were stopped when they reached one of the world’s few clearing banks, across the water there in Luxembourg. Jensbank has over fifty secret accounts there, what they call modestly in the banking world unpublished accounts. And there are trusts over there,’ Dieter waves vaguely across the river, ‘and there are trusts of Jensbank in Switzerland and Liechtenstein too, some of which we found our way into, most of which we didn’t. What we saw, however, were huge transactions in cash, before the shutters got pulled down on us.’
Dieter looks back at Finn as he turns the heat off and the pot sends out its steam into the room.
‘Roth, of course, was-is-a big client of Jensbank, its biggest, perhaps, even the reason for its existence in the first place. KoKo was wrapped up in Jensbank too, before KoKo ceased to exist. And what we believe is that two-at least two-of Jensbank’s directors are these mysterious brothers of Roth.’
‘What is Jensbank now?’ Finn says. ‘Since the Wall came down?’
‘Very well connected,’ Dieter replies. ‘It has forty years of business with the East and the Russians behind it. And forty years of parallel business with the West. Since the Wall came down the bank has continued its activities, with a new twist. It has recently been raising hundreds of millions of dollars from Western investors to buy property that doesn’t exist in the former East Germany.’
‘So it’s in trouble?’ Finn says.
‘No, no, there is a cover-up at some high political level. “Mistakes were made” will be the official interpretation, if it ever comes out at all. Maybe there are too many in the West who are too powerful to let it come out, however. No. What is most interesting, perhaps, about Jensbank is that it will probably no longer exist in five years’ time at all. It has done its work. It kept the wheels of commerce rolling on both sides of the Wall during the Cold War. But now?’ Dieter looks at Finn. ‘Now the Wall is down, there is no need for it. The Russians, the KGB, black money from the East is so entrenched in the West now that banks like Jensbank are superfluous. When the Wall came down, the banks of Geneva and elsewhere were able to welcome the new Russia and all its money with open arms. You see, Finn, you have to ask yourself. Who did the Wall protect? Them or us?’
‘The Wall had to come down,’ Finn answers.
‘It was inevitable, certainly. And it has done a great favour to all those in the East trapped behind it. But it has also done a great favour to the movement of capital. The complexity of Schmidtke’s and Roth’s and the bank’s arrangements was a great strain on the enemy. Now that strain has been removed at a stroke. In Putin’s Russia, the freedom of people will, no doubt, be slowly and incrementally curtailed, but the freedom of money from East to West is total. But where does that money come from and what is it doing? Do we, the ordinary citizens of Western Europe, get the benefit of it?’
Outside, the grey late November light is fading. A few dead leaves flutter across the weatherbeaten wooden sills of the house. Dieter fills the glasses with cognac and pours fresh coffee.
‘You sound like an old-fashioned communist,’ Finn says.
‘Ah, we are both communists, but in the true sense, you and I,’ Dieter says, ‘and we both know it is also an impossible dream. It is something, as you said about my fantasy of being a farmer, that is better left to dreams. The twisted reality of a communist state in action is too dreadful as we have seen.’
‘And the company?’ Finn asks. ‘You said a person, a bank and a company.’
‘You’re impatient, Finn,’ Dieter replies. ‘Yes, you want the company, don’t you? That is the real heart of this. Roth and Schmidtke, they are just the backdrop. You know much about them, but not as much as I do, I think. Jensbank is the machine that made it all work.
‘So. On top of Jensbank there is just one company I can give you, you understand. But it is one example of many hundreds, perhaps thousands of companies in Schmidtke’s stable. But the company will give you what you’re looking for. It is a piece of actual evidence that reveals the continuous thread from the past to the present. From the Cold War up to today, and the KGB’s seamless transition from defending the indefensible to becoming a major player in the so-called real world, the world of money.’
Dieter leaves the room and Finn hears him go down some stairs, perhaps into a cellar.
When he returns he is carrying a small brown box the size of a shoebox, wrapped in heavy clear plastic and sealed with clips to make it watertight.
‘It’s damp down there,’ Dieter says. ‘Sometimes it floods when the river rises. But I have kept a few things from the past in a cupboard high up on the wall. I never expected to touch them again. I hope they are not damaged.’
He puts the box on the table between them, without unwrapping it and begins to talk again.
‘We were investigating a company by the name of Exodi,’ he says tonelessly. ‘That was back in 1991, nearly two years into our investigation of Schmidtke. Nearing the end. It was one of many companies bound up with Schmidtke and had a complicated structure like all the others. It was a set of companies, actually. There was Exodi Geneva, Exodi Luxembourg, Exodi in Paris, Exodi in Liechtenstein, and other places. All were set up by the same treuhand, commercial lawyers. The various Exodi companies had a dozen or so structures behind them that led to two lawyers in the Cayman Islands. The whole thing was the usual set of Russian dolls, one inside the other, no ultimate beneficiaries named outside the lawyers.
‘The treuhand who set up the first Exodi, in Geneva, were the same commercial lawyers who we knew had worked before for Roth. They are a Luxembourg-based legal firm, with connections all over Europe. They set up companies for some not-so-savoury Russian interests and we had watched them for a while before we came across Exodi. So we made our investigations and discovered that Exodi was set up in 1991. In other words, it was set up just six months before we came across the name Exodi.
‘Obligingly, the Geneva finance committee sent us the relevant company documents that showed when and where Exodi Geneva was incorporated. 1991. It was all in order. So we went to Liechtenstein to look at Exodi there and it was the same story. Exodi in Liechtenstein had also been set up six months before, in 1991. I interviewed Hutzger personally. He’s the big wheel in the principality’s finance committee, works as one of the government’s anti-money-laundering experts. He’s impeccable where his background is concerned, and his various seats on worthy international committees that fight money-laundering.
‘Hutzger told me that he had personally looked into the origins of this company and the date was correct and they had nothing on Exodi Liechtenstein that alerted them to any wrongdoing.
‘So we closed off that avenue. But by now my government in Bonn was only too pleased when another avenue was closed off, the boxes ticked, the dossiers closed and filed. Our investigations had already revealed too many uncomfortable things about corruption in Germany that threatened to go very high indeed. I now realised Bonn was already intending to stop our investigations into Schmidtke.
‘But I wasn’t satisfied. I don’t know why. You know, Finn, when an instinct tells you just to look again, even though you don’t know why. Anyway, that’s how it was. I wasn’t happy. So I did. I looked again. And I found a very odd fact indeed. Yes, there was a company called Exodi that had been formed in Liechtenstein in 1991. But there was also a company called Exodi that had been formed in Liechtenstein in 1975. It was wound up in 1989. And I looked further. The same was true of the Exodi companies in Geneva and Luxembourg and Paris. They were all founded in 1975 and all wound up in 1989.’
They are silent and Dieter observes Finn like a doctor watching for symptoms.
‘Exodi is two things,’ Finn says at last. ‘One is real and one is fake.’
But Dieter doesn’t reply directly. He holds Finn’s eyes with his and continues.
‘So I checked back at other Roth companies where we’d closed our investigations and I found the same thing. These other companies had been founded in the seventies or late sixties, some in the eighties, but all of them had been wound up in 1989. February 1989, to be precise. I found twenty-four companies with the same history as Exodi before I realised that the pattern was going to extend to many more, perhaps hundreds more companies, all of which we connected in various clear or obscure ways to Roth.
‘I looked back at our files, working on my own now. I saw that in the few cases–maybe half a dozen or so–that we at the BND had gone to Switzerland or Liechtenstein to ask about these other companies, we had been told by the highest officials that they had all been incorporated in 1991, the same as Exodi. They were clean of Cold War connections, in other words.’
Dieter shakes his cigarette packet to extract a cigarette, but it is empty. Finn throws two packs on to the table between them like a winning poker hand and Dieter takes one with a grunt.
‘When the British arrested Schmidtke at Tegel airport in March 1989,’ he continues as a match flares, ‘he had just returned from depositing nearly one billion dollars in bonds into a bank in Geneva. This bank will be important to your investigations, Finn. It’s a Swiss branch of Jensbank and it has a long, historic trade with the KGB. I will give you the name. But anyway, we know that, from now onwards, Roth was put in charge of that money. The Swiss accounts were to be controlled by Roth after Schmidtke deposited the cash. You see, Schmidtke knew that the writing was on the wall for him and he just managed to make these deposits before the British arrested him. The end was fast, the Wall tumbled earlier than they’d expected. But by the time it fell the decks were cleared. The past was erased. We were ready to close in on Schmidtke when the British arrested him.’
‘And we missed our chance to get Roth,’ Finn says, ‘at the moment when he received this money and before he had time to obscure its origins.’
‘Just so. But to Exodi,’ Dieter continues. ‘The Exodi companies demonstrate two things. First that many or maybe all of the companies Schmidtke and Roth controlled were wound up in 1989 and then re-formed in 1991 under exactly the same names. They were not formed for the first time in 1991, as the documents we looked at, courtesy of the Swiss and Liechtenstein authorities, showed. It was a nice deceit. You look into the origins of a company that you have concerns about and you see it was formed after the period concerning your investigations. It does not occur to you that it may have a history before that. You have nice, clean, official documents in your hands, from impeccable officials, that tell you the date of incorporation. Why look further?
‘But the second thing Exodi demonstrated to me is truly alarming. This second thing is that two of the most senior financial officials in Liechtenstein and Switzerland were able to say, without openly lying, that Exodi was formed in 1991. It was formed in 1991. But not for the first time. Did they know they were lying, these two impeccable officials, Hutzger and his opposite number in Geneva? If they did, it was perfectly deniable.’ Dieter pauses awkwardly, as if he has allowed himself to run on too long to an unwilling listener. But Finn is far from unwilling.
‘Why did they re-form these companies in the same name, after they were wound up?’ Finn says. ‘Why not just make new companies?’
‘For exactly that reason. When I found on my second search that the Exodi companies had been originally founded in 1975, I also found information from that time about the activities of Exodi that related to money-laundering, corruption, fraud. All these activities had KGB traces. But if you looked at the history of these companies, as it was given to us in the documents from Geneva and Liechtenstein, their history only began in 1991. So we must be wrong, that was the implication. Any information about Exodi and the KGB must be wrong. And that’s what they wanted us to believe.’
‘They wanted you to believe the fake Exodi,’ Finn says. ‘But you were right, Dieter. Exodi existed before. And the highest officials in Liechtenstein and Switzerland were covering it up.’
‘Deniably. And without actually lying, yes. And my government in Bonn decided to believe it, knowingly or unknowingly. And again, deniably, without actually lying.’
‘And Bonn closed the investigations.’
‘Swiftly.’
‘And you, Dieter? Did you take what you found to your masters?’
‘It was too late by then and I guessed I would not be thanked for it. I saw which way things were going. The government was using us, its security service, to give it a cloak of respectable investigation into the past, but it didn’t really want us to investigate anything to its end. The glimpses of the truth we’d already found were too frightening.’
Dieter begins to untie the watertight clips, takes off the plastic coat, and pulls the box out from inside it. He pushes it across to Finn.
‘Take these. They’re microfiches; perhaps a hundred and twenty companies of Roth’s and Schmidtke’s. They show their real history before 1989. They are your link from the past to the present, Finn. Look at the Exodi companies.’
Finn doesn’t touch the box.
‘Take it. I don’t want them now,’ Dieter says. ‘Once, I thought I would use them, not any more. When you no longer trust your own government…’ He pauses. ‘Now I spend my time drinking the odd bottle of fine Moselle in the evening. And I’m writing short stories for my brother’s granddaughters, just children’s stories. You, Finn, it’s your turn to keep this box safe.’
Finn takes the box, puts it back in its thick plastic sheath and attaches the clips back on to it.
‘I don’t want to be connected in any way with what you’re doing,’ Dieter says firmly. ‘I’m retired and I live for my great-nieces.’
‘I may need your help, Dieter,’ Finn says. ‘More help,’ he adds.
Dieter sighs and stands up and walks to the window.
‘How will we communicate?’ he says at last without turning back.
Finn draws an old thin hardback book from his coat pocket. He places it carefully on the table. Dieter turns and walks back and sits down again.
‘Lessons in English,’ Finn says. ‘Published in 1941, very few copies left.’
Dieter opens the book and reads: ‘Long Live International Youth Day. Long Live the Communist Party. Long Live Comrade Stalin.’
‘They’re the stories of Sasha and Misha,’ Finn says. ‘Fairy stories, too, in their way. Two kids from the Caucasus. Children’s stories with a difference. They were written to turn children into good little communist citizens. We’ll use this book for code work. No phone calls, no e-mails. This address is my contact.’ He gives Dieter a box number address. ‘What about you?’
‘I’ll send you a contact place,’ Dieter says. ‘I haven’t done this for a while.’
Dieter closes the doors of the fire and clears the glasses and cups into a stone sink. They leave the house and walk around to the stone barns and talk as they go about how the coding is to work.
In the car, Finn gives Dieter a sheet of paper denoting the code’s mechanism. The page numbers that Dieter is to refer to in the stories of Sasha and Misha are indicated by the names of fungi found in another book, The Oxford Book of Fungi. The fungus ‘Witches’ Butter’ is page sixty-eight of Sasha and Misha, for example. The letters of the words on each page in Sasha and Misha change according to the description in The Oxford Book of Fungi of each fungus that is date relevant. And the whole thing shifts after each communication from either of them. It is a crude, old-fashioned type of code, but they’ve both worked with such codes many times.