me over the past twelve months. The tea arrived, and it was drunk. Kerchenko looked impatient but also seemed to be struggling to control it. The other two were bored and looked as if they wanted something stronger than tea.
We must have spent two hours meticulously treading back over old ground, dissecting a sentence here, a glimpse of behaviour there. Patrushev showed no sign of tiring. Then he finally closed the files and put his elbows on the desk and looked at me. Was the meeting over or was this simply a change of tack?
Out of the blue he said, ‘Let’s talk about Finn.’ He simply said Finn. We’d never used anything but Markus.
The other three men in the room looked aghast and then confused. Proper procedure had suddenly been obliterated and they didn’t understand.
I felt my stomach drop and a horrible void open up in its place. I closed my eyes.
As Markus, Finn was always, to me, at a convenient distance in my reports. I was informing on Markus, not Finn. The two had become separated. To me, Markus was almost another person, Finn’s professional doppelganger. But I understood immediately why Patrushev had dropped this bombshell. We were no longer to talk about a target of Russian intelligence, but about a relationship, mine and Finn’s.
I remember, presumably when I had opened my eyes again, seeing Patrushev watching from the other side of the desk. His face expressed a non-committal curiosity.
‘Yes,’ he said, as if he had seen some answer in my reaction. ‘Let’s talk about Finn.’
And so, for the next hour or so, we talked about Finn, right back to the earliest reports on him, right back to the beginning.
Of course, much of it had appeared already in the dossier, both from before I knew Finn and from my own reports. But Patrushev wanted what was behind the facts. We strayed increasingly from the area of intelligence into assessment.
Looking only at Patrushev, I began to talk about what I knew of Finn’s childhood.
Finn had told me about it on a trip to Irkutsk in Siberia. He was visiting the city to look over a British investment there in his Trade and Industry role and he asked me to accompany him. He had a surprise for me. We arrived in Irkutsk on a bleak afternoon in January when the temperature was minus twenty-five degrees and he went at once to the offices of a gold-mining company, a joint venture between British and Russian investors. It was a Friday. When he returned to the hotel, he said, ‘Now we have the weekend to ourselves, Rabbit. I’ve booked a place up on Lake Baikal. That’s the surprise,’ he said delightedly.
He’d arranged the business trip in order to spend the weekend with me.
We stayed in an old wooden house by the frozen lake, the deepest in the world. The house had been bought by a tycoon in Irkutsk and then modernised, though the only real concession to the modern was central heating and a generator. At night, in bed, it was too hot under the bearskins.
The next day we walked along the cliff below the house and found a way down to the lake. Finn collected up some brushwood and made a fire on the ice.
‘It must be six feet thick at least,’ he said.
‘Be careful,’ I said.
We sat on blankets around the fire and then Finn began to tell me where he was born, about his family and his upbringing.
‘I come from the island of Inishturk,’ he said in a self-mockingly grand way, as if he’d owned the island. ‘It’s on the west coast of Ireland.’
Finn’s Irish connection had always fascinated General Kerchenko as well as my two case officers. In their world view, anyone born in Ireland would surely wish to damage the British Government.
‘The community I was born into was an experiment. I was born into a social experiment, Anna, just like you but in a different way. Inishturk back then was what is known as an “alternative community”. It later morphed into a hippy colony. My mother and father were actually both British but Ireland was the venue for my conception and birth for the simple reason that it was as far from what they called the “rat race” or the “machine” as possible. It still provided some familiarity of culture, I suppose, if only in the climate and the rugged scenery of the North Atlantic.
‘The idea of the community was that everyone played an equal role,’ he said, and stirred the fire with a stick. ‘There were no leaders. Whether your job was cultivating vegetables or chairing what they called community conscience meetings to decide where the community was going, or what was wrong, you were all equal.’
He looked at me with weary amusement and exhaled a stream of cigarette smoke. ‘Sound familiar?’ he said.
I smiled but said nothing.
‘The children all belonged to the community,’ he went on, now staring into the fire. ‘They were not part of their parents. I stayed in most of the stone crofts, which had been renovated in a rudimentary way, at some time or another. The community was more or less under orders to be one happy family. I was taught that my family was the community, and my blood relations were like anyone else.
‘When I was six I was put through an ordeal they called ‘shouting therapy’, which was for my own benefit, of course. I was stood in the centre of a circle while the adults shouted abuse at me and hurled the most vicious personal insults they could come up with; what I looked like, how I talked, my pathetic desire to be close to my mother. It was a ritualistic humiliation. It was very frightening but very organised. I cried. I couldn’t stop crying and they judged that to be good. The purpose of the process was to destroy my self-belief and make me need them more. Equality meant the equality of subjugation.’
Finn threw more wood on the fire and stood up.
‘That, of course, is always the way with social engineering,’ he said. ‘You know that as well as I do, Anna. But hippies were supposed to be different. They’re just human, as it turned out.’
He held out his hand for me and we walked away from the fire a little. The low sun had disappeared behind a clouded winter sky. The trees were frosted up above us, and it was completely still. Then it started to snow.
‘My mother became the leader of the community,’ he resumed. ‘She was a tyrant. My father was weak, resentful, humiliated and did nothing to protect me at all. He became an alcoholic eventually and left the island. That was when I was about seven. I haven’t seen him since. Then, slowly, an elite formed in the community, as it does in any community. In this case it was made up of the members who controlled the supply of drugs, mainly hashish in the beginning, then heroin. Opium for the people.’
We walked back to the fire and Finn raked it over unnecessarily. No spark could have lit anything on that bitter day. Then he put his arm around me and we walked back up the fishing track we’d found to get down to the lake.
‘But when I was twelve, I was saved. My uncle, my father’s elder brother, came to Ireland and took me away,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how he managed it, it was totally against my mother’s will. I expect it involved money. I went with my uncle to Cambridge and began school for the first time, proper school. My uncle was a biochemist at Cambridge University, my aunt taught Buddhism. For a while after they took me away, people from the community hounded us. They wanted me back and it was frightening. They came to the house outside Cambridge, sending my aunt and uncle threats and hate mail. But they tired of it and disappeared from my life. So my uncle had me educated. I won a scholarship to Cambridge. I haven’t seen my mother since I was twelve. She disappeared to South America, I believe.’
We arrived at the wooden house and Finn hugged me for a long time before we entered. When he pulled away he couldn’t look at me and I knew he’d told me something very painful to him. I think it was the first time I felt I loved him.
It was getting dark outside the windows at the Forest. I realised it must be late. But Putin’s head of intelligence showed no signs of urgency. A bottle of vodka had finally arrived, apparently to placate the General, but Patrushev’s fondness for our national drink is well known.
We could hear the traffic on the motorway into Moscow and I thought of Barvikha, which lay not far away in the forest in the opposite direction to the capital. I’d said I would meet Nana there, but she was used to me breaking arrangements.
Suddenly Patrushev shot a question at me.
‘And did they?’ he asked. ‘Did they destroy Finn’s self-belief at the commune?’
‘In a somewhat misleading way, I’ve never met anyone with more self-belief,’ I said. ‘He has a certain
