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
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.
