may play a part in the proceedings.
They know much, Finn observes, but from the line of questioning, he hazards a guess that they don’t know about his meeting with Dieter or his trip to Luxembourg.
‘Been frisked?’ Adrian suddenly asks. ‘Have they gone through all your hidden pockets?’ he adds sarcastically.
‘Your boys took everything I have, Adrian,’ Finn says.
‘Which is what?’
‘Nothing much except a Eurostar ticket and some money,’ Finn answers. ‘And a bag of dirty clothes.’
He has cached the box that Dieter gave him somewhere, before returning to England.
‘No receipts from some nice
‘Nothing, no. I was on holiday. I only keep stuff I can put against tax.’
‘Convenient,’ the Oxford recruit says, and receives a look from Adrian of such histrionically exaggerated admiration that it mocks the boy and reduces him, as intended, to blushing silence.
They’re angry that he’s gone abroad against their friendly but explicit instructions. Adrian has an energy pumping off his body that would melt a small snowfield. Finn knows Adrian’s rage without observing anything. Adrian feels let down, too, he guesses.
So Finn tells them he’s been clearing his head, walking in the Hartz Forest, near the old border, saying goodbye to his old life.
They didn’t believe him, but what could they do.
‘Why didn’t you go walking in the Pennines?’ the young recruit is emboldened to ask him.
‘It’s not next to the Iron Curtain,’ Finn says.
‘Neither is the Hartz Forest,’ the recruit says, a little too quickly. ‘Not any more. Not for eleven years, since eighty-nine.’
Finn shrugs. ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he says.
And then the real purpose of his abduction from Waterloo station enters the proceedings. In a carefully timed pause, Adrian, the Desk head, old friend, and Finn’s long-time ‘spiritual’ adviser, looks up at him and loosens his tie, as if they are all enjoying a balmy spring morning. He snaps the toothpick in two.
Adrian, as Finn describes him, is a red-faced man of middling height, who wears an ordinary-looking grey suit, white shirt, red tie. Finn says Adrian wears red ties because they dampen the glow of his well-lunched face, which has the jolly ruddiness of the Laughing Cavalier, he says. Adrian is an abrupt, sharp and, on the face of it, jovial fellow, coming to the end of a long and distinguished career at the Service—with still the possibility of the ultimate promotion—and, before his Service career began, a leading figure in Military Intelligence. He’s served in the SAS in several of the British postcolonial wars in Africa, the Middle East and the Far East, but still had the time after they were all finished to rise very nearly to the top of SIS, or MI6, whichever you prefer.
Finn told me once that early on in their relationship he’d asked Adrian what he did in his spare time at his country house. Pheasant shooting, perhaps?
‘When you’ve shot as many darkies as I have,’ Adrian informed him, ‘banging away at the odd pheasant doesn’t really cut the mustard.’
But Adrian hides behind this facade of military bluster. It is an artificial construct that lulls others into a belief that his mind is less acute than he sounds. For behind the barked sentences and the politically incorrect sentiments lies a mind as sharp as a mussel shell. And Finn agrees with this estimate. Finn has a great admiration for Adrian’s intellect, if nothing else about him, and he wouldn’t have had if his boss were a fool.
Adrian recruited Finn and there exists between them that special relationship that exists between a recruiter and his subject; like a father Adrian has sought to make Finn in his own image, but like a proud father, too, he admires the differences between them. When Adrian recruited Finn, Finn was Adrian’s shapeless clay, whom he has sought to fashion into a worthy object of his attention. If Finn has let Adrian down with his recent Moscow debacle, Adrian doesn’t show it.
But-so easy to forget-Adrian is also completely ruthless. His generally jovial bonhomie is a convenient disguise for that. Finn was scared at the beginning of his time in the Service of getting on the wrong side of Adrian and he has cultivated a sufficient, though cunningly insubordinate, friendship with Adrian so that finally Finn believes he has manoeuvred Adrian into the role of older brother rather than father.
Either way, he has let Adrian down now and Adrian doesn’t like anyone to let him down.
And so now, at the house in Hackney, Adrian loosens his tie, undoes the top button of his shirt and reaches the reason for his presence at this otherwise routine telling-off of a wandering ex-intelligence officer.
‘You’ve been a good officer, Finn,’ Adrian says, so gently it puts Finn on his guard. ‘Very good. Exceptional. Your work in Moscow could have been done by no one else, in my opinion. Extremely sensitive stuff and well handled from start to finish. I’m very proud of you.’
‘Thank you, Adrian.’
‘Your style may not have been to everyone’s taste, but it was to mine. But that doesn’t matter. You achieved great results.’
This time Finn doesn’t reply, but inclines his head slightly to acknowledge such unusually high praise from Adrian.
‘Never mind the way it all ended. It takes nothing away from your achievements, my boy,’ Adrian says.
‘I’m sorry for the way it ended too,’ Finn says, and in this room he means it. ‘For what it’s worth,’ he adds.
But Adrian ignores this, either because Finn’s regret is not actually worth anything to him, or simply because he doesn’t like to be interrupted when he has the floor.
‘So I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Finn,’ Adrian says quietly. ‘It’s come as quite a blow.’ Adrian sweeps back his lank forelock. ‘Finn, I’m afraid Mikhail was a fraud. Has been all along, I’m sorry to say. It’s come as a great shock to everyone and I know that will include you, above all.’
The young recruit nods slowly and looks down at the table, as if they’re mourning a colleague, as, in a sense, they are.
Finn doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything. He is stunned. He knows exactly what Adrian is saying, who Adrian is talking about.
‘Yes,’ Adrian says cautiously and observes Finn closely. ‘It’s a confusing thing to hear, I agree,’ he continues, injecting a note of sympathy into his voice that fools nobody. But Adrian doesn’t look like a man who’s ever been confused, doubtful or even in two minds about anything in his life.
‘Mikhail has been very useful,’ he continues. ‘A very clever source indeed. And, to us, a very expensive double agent for many years now,’ Adrian says.
Finn watches Adrian’s fingers tap irritably on the table.
‘I’m not saying Mikhail hasn’t provided us with good material, you understand. From time to time,’ Adrian says breezily. ‘Of course he has. That’s why he’s been so bloody successful. He gave us- you’- Adrian flatteringly nods across the table to Finn- ‘some very useful material, valuable both to us and to our friends in Gros-venor Square’ by which Adrian means the Americans. ‘But the big stuff which we- which you too, I know, Finn- set such store by, all this turns out to be the fruits of so much KGB inter-clan warfare and, to be honest, it doesn’t take much light to be shone on it to reveal the flaws.’
Adrian pauses for his peroration.
‘I’m afraid Mikhail allowed this internecine intrigue in the KGB to cloud his judgement on the issues that were most important to us. Mikhail’s been fighting his corner in an internal battle for one KGB clan’s victory over another. In doing so, he’s used us, rather than the other way round.’
Leaning back in his chair and at last stopping the tapping of his fingers by cradling his hands together across his chest, Adrian sighs.
‘This part of Mikhail’s intelligence-the crucial part-is, to coin a phrase, absolutely useless,’ Adrian finishes with a flourish, joining his fingers in a Gothic arch.
Perhaps Finn is too quick in his acceptance of what Adrian has said, or doesn’t break into the protest of anger or frustration that Adrian expects, for Adrian doesn’t take his eyes off him for a second, searching to see how the news is being received. After all, to Finn and all the other people in the room, Mikhail is the apex of Finn’s career, the source that has sustained him for so long. Finn should be devastated. Mikhail is the reason he was kept in place
