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’.
The first breaths of democracy that Russia had taken in the nineties were stifled. Putin told Bush that Russia would have democracy, but democracy according to the traditions of Russia. As everyone knew, Russia had no traditions of democracy.
And Putin himself became an iconic figure. In a factory in the Ural mountains, furry rabbits were manufactured that sang a pop song about the President:
I want to change my guy
For a man like Putin
One like Putin who is strong
One like Putin who won’t insult me
One like Putin who won’t leave me.
At the 2004 elections Putin backed his own invented party, United Russia, which was unconstitutional for a president to do. United Russia’s election posters were portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky and those they jailed, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Brodsky- as if they’d all been one happy family.
The world’s leaders queued up to meet Putin and gain an entrée into Russia’s oil and gas fields. And Russia again began to push its power beyond its own borders, attempting to fix elections in the Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.
Two MPs were murdered after they questioned the KGB’s actions, over thirty journalists were killed, and numerous others who never made the papers, but who got in the way of the regime.
‘Putin made us an offer to exchange our freedom for bread,’ one politician said, ‘and many Russians accepted this trade.’
Just before Christmas in 2004, Finn suddenly resigned from his job and announced he was going to write a book. He bade farewell to colleagues whose main role had been to parlay reports of his progress to Adrian in the preceding years and Adrian hosted a dinner for Finn in a private room at the Ritz- an overdue acknowledgement, Adrian said, of Finn’s fine record of service. Adrian made a speech, but he was slightly drunk and told a risqué story of a trip he and Finn had made behind the Wall in ’88. But Adrian, in his drunkenness, got it confused and, when everyone laughed at the denouement, most of them were laughing at Adrian.
A week later, Adrian took Finn for a walk in Green Park and questioned him about the proposed book. Apparently satisfied that Finn had ‘recovered’, as Adrian put it, from his delusions of four years before, Adrian gave Finn his imprimatur to write a story, as long as the Service got a look at it first.
And so for the next three months, Finn established himself as a writer and never travelled out of London, quietening any fears that he might go off into the blue.
Meanwhile, I was able to tell the Forest that it was all cover, and they seemed to believe me.
In the early summer of 2005, Finn announced to anyone who would listen that he and I were going on a walking holiday in the Swiss Alps. And on 28 June, we took a flight to Geneva.