rendezvous with Finn again. My excitement was tempered by exhaustion, but mostly by caution. It was one thing for them to know that Finn loved me, but I knew it was necessary to establish that I had no such feelings for him.
Vladimir was very attentive towards me. Our long acquaintance made the time together as relaxed as it could be. One evening, we had a drink together in the compound after my coding instruction ended. It was nearly the end of the two-week training and we both felt good. I was happy that the time for meeting Finn was near. We sat in a log house in the forest, away from the others, and drank beers and talked and laughed about how my father had been so angry that I’d refused to marry Vladimir.
‘Might you have married me if your father hadn’t wanted you to?’ he asked me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’
He looked pleased.
‘Why haven’t you married?’ I asked him. ‘You should be married. You’re the marrying type.’
‘What does that mean!’ he protested, and then he laughed easily. ‘Anyway, you can talk.’
‘One day I want to settle down at Barvikha,’ I said, ‘with four children and a good Russian husband.’
‘You’d better get on with it, then,’ he said. ‘You’ll be over the hill.’
I punched him on the shoulder and caught him right on the nerve and he bent over in pain hugging his shoulder.
‘Thank God I didn’t marry you,’ he said through gritted teeth.
Later we were sitting very close on the porch, facing each other on two stools, elbows on our knees and each cradling a bottle of beer. I saw a gleam of tenderness and excitement in his eyes.
‘I’ve always liked you, Vladimir,’ I said.
I saw he couldn’t speak. Then he looked down, unable to hold my eyes.
‘You’re the only woman I’ve ever asked to marry me, that’s the truth, Anna,’ he said. ‘I never wanted to marry anyone else.’
I put my hand on his arm and he looked up.
‘Maybe…?’ he said, and he let the question hang in the air.
‘Let’s go inside,’ I replied.
For our remaining days at the Forest, we shared a bed and I told him that when this was all over, we should get married. I don’t know if this was the cruellest lie I’ve ever told in my life. I don’t know, because I don’t know what his motives were, whether he was genuine or whether he was one more hook they wanted to plant in me before I went to Finn. I trusted nobody. Why should I? We were in the Forest and I was being prepared to find the thing the Patriots most wanted to find, the enemy within. But for my purposes, it suited me for them to believe I was committed to Russia and that Vladimir was my personal route home.
On the last night at the Forest, lying in bed, I told Vladimir I loved him.
‘I’ve never told any man that before,’ I said.
I don’t know if we were both play-acting, or if it was just me. All I know is that, a few days before my rendezvous with Finn, I’d told another man I loved him, and I’d never told Finn that.
On a hot day at the end of September, I was summoned to Patrushev’s dacha, to the north of Moscow and across the lake from the dacha where Putin entertains world leaders. When I arrived in the car that Patrushev had sent, I saw that it was a meeting to be attended only by Patrushev, myself and Vladimir. I justified my great lie by the presence of Vladimir on that day. If he were so far on the inside, then how could I ever trust that his feelings for me were genuine either?
Patrushev made a stirring speech at the dacha about my importance to my country and the crucial role I had to play.
‘And we’ll keep an eye on your grandmother for you,’ he said. ‘I know how much you care for her.’
It was the usual threat. Despite my training, my job, my father and heritage, despite my visible attachment to Vladimir, they knew the only place my heart had always been, with Nana.
When it was time to leave, Patrushev stood and we toasted Russia. He took me by the shoulders and looked at me with his penetrating eyes.
‘Remember, Colonel,’ he warned me, ‘his only interest in you is to use you. All the rest is fake.’
Vladimir came to the airport with me and we–or was it just I?–made a great false show of hugging and kissing each other.
22
AFTER MORE THAN A YEAR without contact between Finn and me, our reunion held all the anticipation–principally the fear and doubts–that any lover would have felt in the same position.
How would we feel about each other now, I wondered, away from the familiarity of the surroundings where our intimacy had grown? Was our affair a thing of a particular time and place? Would the spark between us still exist? Would it need rekindling?
Too much expectation risked disappointment, too little risked failing to rise to the occasion and, perhaps, missing the moment, the opportunity, for ever.
I felt awkward and out of place at the airport in Marseilles, coming through the sliding glass doors beyond Immigration. There were groups of my fellow Russians already brimming with enthusiasm for a summer holiday away from Moscow’s more anxious heat. My own arrival brought me face to face with a task that now seemed impossible: to love Finn and satisfy my masters.
I didn’t see Finn at first. And then something drew my gaze towards a figure leaning against a car rental desk by the exit. He was reading a newspaper and it covered most of his face. Between us was a throng of taxi drivers and private chauffeurs holding cards with names on them.
I looked idly across the airport’s concourse and wondered who was from the Forest here, who had travelled with me on the plane, and where they were placed in the hall now.
The reason I didn’t see Finn at first was because he’d almost completely changed. He was very tanned and hadn’t shaved for several days. His hair was long, down to his shoulders, and he’d dyed it a sort of dirty blond. He was wearing a light blue canvas jacket and jeans and, I was startled to see when he flicked the newspaper over briefly, he had no shirt under the jacket. Around his neck I saw a necklace of blue stones, lapis maybe. It was his feet I finally recognised. He wore a pair of old deck shoes with paint on the left shoe. I remembered them from his flat in Moscow.
In a split second our eyes met and then he looked away, still holding the newspaper. He walked with measured swiftness in the opposite direction and exited through automatic glass doors into the azure heat. I didn’t follow him but exited through other automatic doors straight ahead of me. We found ourselves thirty yards apart, on the pavement where the taxis and buses pulled up. We were separated by travellers, their luggage, drivers, porters and airport staff. There was a convenient pandemonium of greeting, and the loading of vehicles.
From the corner of my eye I saw Finn walk quickly across the road, dodging cars, and I followed parallel, keeping the thirty yards between us. Madly, I was briefly irritated in the heat that he wasn’t carrying my heavy case.
I saw him weave into a car park. I watched him look around lazily, behind and in front, and automatically made the same scan myself to see if anyone on foot was tailing either of us. For me in the crush, it was impossible to know, but he seemed to be clear. I saw him flick a switch on a bunch of keys and the lights on a white Renault flashed. I stopped on the far side of the slip road.
He got into the car, reversed out and drove slowly down the slip road towards me. I watched to see if other cars did the same. He stopped the car and threw open the passenger door and one of the rear doors. I manhandled my case on to the back seat and stepped in beside him.
I had forgotten it would be like this. Because it was Finn I was meeting, I was unprepared for it. His first words to me were matter-of-fact.
‘What’s behind?’
‘A dark blue BMW about twenty yards away and a white Mercedes behind that.’
‘Ahead?’
