WHEN I’D GOT OVER the shock of Patrushev actually appearing at the Forest, it was clear that the FSB chief, our new boss of the renamed and airbrushed KGB, had been sitting in an adjoining room, wired to ours. But at the moment he entered the room, I was completely taken aback. The others, while making their respect obvious to Patrushev, looked even more astonished.
Patrushev didn’t come to foreign intelligence territory, to the Forest. He and the SVR chief were fierce rivals and there was no precedent as far as I knew for the two agencies entering each other’s ground. Foreign and home intelligence waged a low-key war against each other. It was said that three of Patrushev’s agents had been arrested in Paris a few months before while following a group of Chechens in the French capital. The Forest, angry that their rivals were performing a foreign intelligence function, had tipped off the French security services.
I had seen Patrushev a few times before, but only from afar. He had spoken at KGB functions and afterwards worked the room, vodka in hand, but I had never been introduced.
On this afternoon Nikolai Patrushev was dressed in his trademark grey suit and red tie. A tall, hawkish man, his receding hair was brushed over a balding patch and his thin nose appeared to hover over thinner lips. His eyes had a hard, mesmerising stare that ensured you met his gaze. He was Putin’s close ally, which might explain how he could appear at the Forest on the territory of his rival. I suppose Finn was a moving target between agencies but Patrushev’s presence could only have suggested Putin’s personal interest in the case.
Patrushev had come with Putin, like so many of the president’s acolytes, from his St Petersburg clan, the gang Putin collected around him from the time when he was deputy mayor of the city. Like Putin, he had collaborated with the KGB since he was a student. The two of them were practically born to the profession, but by nature not background.
Patrushev’s job was to guard the President’s back while the new order was being put into place before and during Putin’s rise to power. His personal guardianship of Putin was all in the name of national security, of course.
He stood in silence for a moment, instilling a sort of cold quietness into the room. A military man, tall, erect and proud of the military achievements in his family, he is the perfect KGB clone. His fitness from playing the favoured KGB sport of volleyball was evident from his lean strength. I knew he chaired the sport’s national organisation. From gossip among acquaintances over at the FSB headquarters in Moscow, I also knew he read thrillers and spy stories obsessively, after a personal assistant hired for the purpose recommended the best ones. Otherwise he attended the Bolshoi regularly, but only to listen to Russian composers. And he hunted, drank vodka and collected weaponry.
After the surprise and then their oleaginous deference to the KGB boss, the three men in the room were silenced by his arrival. I stood automatically and he looked me over with what is normally called a practised eye.
There followed a complicated procedure, as there were only four chairs in the room. Kerchenko gave up his seat to Patrushev and took Yuri’s. Yuri took Sasha’s and Sasha was told to get another chair. I sat back down where I was.
Patrushev leaned his elbows on the desk, tucked the back of his hands under his chin and wasted no time.
‘Anna, I want you to tell us what really goes on behind this man’s ramblings,’ he said in a clipped voice. ‘I don’t think any of us really believes that he is a drunk who rants on and on for nothing, do we? Or some obsessive at London’s Speaker’s Corner. His outspokenness about Vladimir Vladimirovich is a little hard to take at face value, don’t you think?’
His use of my first name, rather than my rank, indicated that the meeting was to take a new turn and for the first time I felt nervous. In some walks of life, such intimacy is only menacing. Patrushev’s presence had raised the stakes enormously. Whatever the reason Finn interested them, it was no longer because they believed they could turn him. Patrushev wouldn’t be taking a personal role otherwise.
But I didn’t see any need to reply beyond tilting my head in uncertain agreement.
‘So. Why do you think he is so interested in giving us his thoughts on how much the West should distrust our president? What is he hoping to gain from this?’ Patrushev then began to answer his own question. ‘Unlike some, I don’t think it was a prelude to him coming over to us,’ he said, casting a withering look at General Kerchenko. ‘You don’t tell your girlfriend you hate her mother before you ask her to marry you, do you? Tell me your thoughts please, Anna, based on your very special position with him.’
‘I’m sure that he never intended to defect,’ I agreed and got cold looks from the General and Yuri. ‘I think he genuinely dislikes the President, however, fears him perhaps, fears what Russia can become under his leadership. I think he is genuine in that.’
‘But why is he so keen for us to know this?’ Patrushev pressed me without a pause. ‘There’s barely a report of yours since New Year’s Eve that doesn’t contain his thoughts on the subject.’
‘I don’t feel that he is really talking to me at all,’ I said truthfully. ‘I believe when he tells me what he thinks about the President it is as if he is talking to his own people. He says it to me because of his frustration that nobody in London will listen to him. I don’t think he has any motive for letting us know his thoughts. I think he’s angry, frustrated, but he’s not trying to give us any kind of message.’
‘Maybe he’s trying to get you to agree with him about our president,’ Kerchenko said, with some accusation in his voice. ‘To subvert you, perhaps, so that you’ll help him get whatever it is he’s after.’
Patrushev gave him a sharp look and then looked back at me again.
‘I agree with you,’ Patrushev said to me. ‘He’s not trying to give us or you any message at all. But now he has finally vented his anger about British policy to his superiors, where he formerly aired it only to you. He’s stepped over the line, and they’ve recalled him to London. Would you agree?’
‘I think he has committed professional suicide, yes,’ I said. ‘I think it’s been coming for a long time. They put up with his increasingly undisciplined behaviour but now he’s gone too far.’
‘A spent force…’ Patrushev said.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said immediately, and I didn’t know why I said it. Perhaps it was Finn’s remark, ‘I’m going feral.’ Perhaps, too, it was the missing element in my conversation with Finn at the Baltschug–his assumption, the fact that he didn’t think it mattered that I wouldn’t go with him,
‘Oh?’ Patrushev said and there was a clammy silence in the room. ‘A British spy is suddenly taken home for insubordination concerning the most fundamental level of policy and he is not a spent force? What will he do? Write a book, perhaps, exposing the limitations of Britain’s intelligence service? Another David Shayler?’
‘Perhaps the whole thing’s a set-up,’ I said. ‘They want it to seem as though he’s been sacked.’
‘That’s good. Yes, that’s good. But you don’t think he’s another Shayler. Your valuable instincts tell you he’s not.’
‘They do.’
‘Use them,’ he said and leaned over towards me. ‘Think independently. You are a good officer for that reason. Your progress has been noted with approval for some time. Think freely.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, but I was thinking about my conversation with Vladimir earlier in the afternoon and how their encouragement to think freely had landed him a ten-year exile in the Cape Verde Islands.
‘But be careful,’ Patrushev said slowly, as if reading my thoughts. ‘Remember where his independence, unbridled, undisciplined, seems to have got him.’ For a moment I was confused as to whether he was talking about Vladimir or Finn. ‘Independent thought is not anarchic thought,’ Patrushev explained.
‘No, sir,’ I said, though that seemed to me to be exactly what it was.
‘But first, let’s get some tea,’ he said to nobody in particular and Kerchenko gave the order with a nod of his head to Sacha who picked up the phone and called for tea.
‘I like all your reports, Anna,’ Patrushev said. The use of my name again made me increasingly wary. ‘They are a mix of the factual and personal. They have insight.’
I judged that I had thanked him enough by now.
‘But no one, no one can get everything into a report. The apparently unimportant comment, the throwaway line, the nuance, the remark that seems to mean something but means something else. And, simply, the forgotten. All that could amount to a whole volume for a twenty-minute conversation, as I’m sure you’re aware.’
He then went back over a dozen of my reports on Finn, apparently at random, which had been submitted by
