Red to Black

years before appeared in his annual accounts back then as ‘gambling debts’, and he was summoned by the Office at the time to receive a warning about it.

The boat holds some kind of magic for Finn, a man who believes in magic without troubling to enquire too deeply, relying only on some instinct, some sense of its benevolence. But the magic is also more prosaic than Finn cares to admit. He has managed to keep the boat’s existence a secret from his employers, and that is the real magic for him. As his reputation at the Service for recklessness and loose talk grew, Finn was, quite naturally, considered verbally incontinent. How could he have any secrets from them?

‘If you choose a mask,’ he once told me, ‘choose one which is demeaning to you, like drunkenness. No one believed Kim Philby was a traitor, because how could a drunk be a successful traitor? What they should have asked was, how could a traitor be a successful drunk? They should have looked at his drunkenness and asked how real it was.

‘So if you choose a mask, for whatever reason, choose one which is unflattering, unprofessional, foolish even. Then no one will believe that you’ve chosen it, and no one, therefore, will believe it is a mask.’

‘And how do you know’, I asked him, ‘when your mask, your pretence, possesses you and becomes who you are?’

But I was thinking more about myself than Finn.

‘That’s the hardest bit of all,’ he said.

But thanks to the deliberate foolishness of his mask, Finn’s employers missed the boat, as it were.

For three days, Finn stays on his boat. It is called Bride of the Wind and named after a painting he loved by Oskar Kokoschka. He rows ashore in the day for supplies from a farm shop situated above the woods along the riverbank and he occasionally visits the chandlery on the other side of the river. The boat is a totem for him, a symbol of freedom, an escape from his other life, from all his other lives.

I have seen Bride of the Wind, sailed in her. She is tall-masted, long-planked and with a cutaway stern called a lute; her beautiful lines a poem of craftsmanship. In the saloon below decks was a framed, salt-faded print of a poem composed by Oskar Kokoschka’s friend, George Trakl:

Over blackish cliffs

Falls drunk with death

The glowing bride of the wind

The blue wave of the glacier.

During these days, Finn paints and varnishes where neglect and weather damage demand. He mends a broken pulley block, replaces some worn-out halyards and services the engine. Fuelled and watered, he leaves the river on a spring tide under the nearly full moon and sails to France, to a little fishing port on the Brittany coast where they love old working boats and where, if you sail in one, nobody bothers to ask for your passport.

He spends the evening with an old aquaintance, a red-headed Breton boat builder, in a tiny, black-tarred fisherman’s bar up the hill from the harbour. After two o’clock in the morning there are just three of them, Finn, the redhead and the moustached patron with a fat belly, who is a grumpy old misanthrope, but who warms up slowly after midnight like a rusty night storage heater. It is into the patron’s spare room that Finn collapses into bed sometime in the early hours.

The next day he catches a series of trains that take him by late evening to the Cote d’Azur.

In August along the coast from La Napoule to Monte Carlo, wealthy Russians, both exiles and those close and loyal to the Putin regime, are displaying their riches and their women in the hotels and casinos, and in the private chateaux and yachts they have bought for themselves in the previous ten years.

But Finn isn’t going south for a summer holiday. He writes just three words on this journey. Building A Network.

18

FOR TWO WEEKS Finn criss-crosses southern Europe, from the Russian chateaux on the Cote d’Azur to private banking halls in Geneva, to a small and poor canton in Switzerland. His final stop, before departing the mainland of Europe on Bride of the Wind as the equinoctial storms set in, is Tegernsee where he discreetly sets up his hideaway in the pink house under the name of a brass-plate company domiciled in the Caribbean, which he had quietly created for himself while working in London. He is laying the ground for the work ahead.

The network he sets up could be described as ramshackle. It consists of one or two angry, self-pitying Russian billionaires, both wanted for imprisonment in Siberia; of money-laundering prosecutors and Swiss bankers; disgruntled KGB agents engaged in clan warfare; foreign intelligence malcontents from various countries; figures from the political fringes of the European Union who’ve been passed over for promotion or who are afraid of where the European Union is treading in its relations with Russia; private investigators, like Frank, who know the ins and outs of Europe’s clearing banks and offshore shell companies; and others on the fringes of the intelligence world, one or two of whom provide a small but significant insight into Finn’s quest, and the rest who talk a lot and say nothing. Many of these contacts have private motives, or grander geopolitical ideas that either crush them under the weight or distort their reason. A few are good, clear, honest people. These Finn treats as family.

He begins on that August night, after a day on trains bound for the south, at a party in Antibes, thrown by an acquaintance from Moscow in the 1990s. Boris Berezovsky, until a little over a year before the senior figure among the seven bankers who ruled Russia, is now firmly in exile in one of his many homes in the West, the grand Chateau de la Garoupe, where he nurses his dreams of a triumphant return.

On this night, however, Finn isn’t after information. He wants some of this cash that washes the Cote d’Azur more brightly than the phosphorescence on its beaches. What he wants is funding. Here, among the Russians disenchanted with Putin, he will find the cash that will pay for the lease in Tegernsee and fund the subsequent years of his investigations.

But he goes to Berezovsky’s party for a second reason. He knows his presence in the house of Putin’s enemy will filter back to Moscow, the Forest and the Kremlin. Even Berezovsky can’t invite two hundred and fifty guests without there being an informer among them. So Finn goes along to lay the ground for his reunion with me. He wants us, at the Forest, to know exactly where he is. He knows that they will send me after him.

Whether he finds any of the funds he needs from Berezovsky or from one of the many other billionaires, multimillionaires and also-rans at this party- or whether he takes a hat round and gets a sub from more than one of them- he doesn’t say.

But the next night he has dinner at the Hermitage Hotel in Monte Carlo with one of the guests from the night before. He is a Russian oil baron, Gennady Liakubsky, and Finn meets him along with one of Liakubsky’s cronies from the Russian underworld, and another man.

And this is where we at the Forest begin to pick him up on our radar. One of our SVR agents on the Cote d’Azur is a real-estate agent who deals in many of the high-end properties the Russian rich are buying. He has been at the party where Finn appeared and has put a tail on him.

And so I knew Finn was dining with Liakubsky and his mob friends that night.

Within twelve hours we had the photographs of this dinner back with us at the Forest; Liakubsky, in the company of a Russian mafioso recently released from prison and known as Yakutchik- ‘the little Yakut’–and another man, a Russian trader living in Geneva who calls himself Danny.

Finn is sitting at a private table at the Hermitage in Monte Carlo with five waiters for the four of them, who are drinking thousand-dollar bottles of wine decanted and poured by a sixth waiter. Finn is laughing and toasting with a billionaire thief and the best of the Russian underworld.

He’s in his element, relishing this role that will later that night or the next day engender that curious brand of guilt and sorrow that is always mixed with pride.

He’s telling filthy jokes and indulging in the back-slapping bonhomie with the best of them. But it is an unhappy union of a disgraced British spy and two thieves and a murderer, disguised as a convivial supper between colleagues.

‘I am taking their money; money stolen off the backs of the Russian people. These people stole it from other thieves and murderers, but ultimately it comes from the poor, the old, the veterans of war and Communist