had to give away information Finn would rather not have given up. I slowly revealed MI6’s progress with Exodi, with the Uzbekistan connections and General Baseer, with the Luxembourg MP and the secret accounts at Westbank.
The Forest was delighted with Mikhail even though it was just a codename. I heard that a new and special file had been opened on the case and headed ‘Mikhail’.
In this period up to the spring and summer of 2005, Putin built up a hierarchy of power in Russia that harked back to Peter the Great. He won the presidency again in 2004, with such embarrassing ease that Grigory Yavlinsky, the head of Russia’s Liberal party, said, ‘And who invented this system? It used to take a slightly different form, but it was invented by Stalin in the 1930s.’
Slowly, power was drained from the executive, from parliament–the Duma-from the regions, the judiciary, the Federation Council, business and the media. It all found its way into the hands of the
The first breaths of democracy that Russia had taken in the nineties were stifled. Putin told Bush that Russia would have democracy, but democracy according to the traditions of Russia. As everyone knew, Russia had no traditions of democracy.
And Putin himself became an iconic figure. In a factory in the Ural mountains, furry rabbits were manufactured that sang a pop song about the President:
At the 2004 elections Putin backed his own invented party, United Russia, which was unconstitutional for a president to do. United Russia’s election posters were portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky and those they jailed, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Brodsky- as if they’d all been one happy family.
The world’s leaders queued up to meet Putin and gain an entree into Russia’s oil and gas fields. And Russia again began to push its power beyond its own borders, attempting to fix elections in the Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.
Two MPs were murdered after they questioned the KGB’s actions, over thirty journalists were killed, and numerous others who never made the papers, but who got in the way of the regime.
‘Putin made us an offer to exchange our freedom for bread,’ one politician said, ‘and many Russians accepted this trade.’
Just before Christmas in 2004, Finn suddenly resigned from his job and announced he was going to write a book. He bade farewell to colleagues whose main role had been to parlay reports of his progress to Adrian in the preceding years and Adrian hosted a dinner for Finn in a private room at the Ritz- an overdue acknowledgement, Adrian said, of Finn’s fine record of service. Adrian made a speech, but he was slightly drunk and told a risque story of a trip he and Finn had made behind the Wall in ’88. But Adrian, in his drunkenness, got it confused and, when everyone laughed at the denouement, most of them were laughing at Adrian.
A week later, Adrian took Finn for a walk in Green Park and questioned him about the proposed book. Apparently satisfied that Finn had ‘recovered’, as Adrian put it, from his delusions of four years before, Adrian gave Finn his imprimatur to write a story, as long as the Service got a look at it first.
And so for the next three months, Finn established himself as a writer and never travelled out of London, quietening any fears that he might go off into the blue.
Meanwhile, I was able to tell the Forest that it was all cover, and they seemed to believe me.
In the early summer of 2005, Finn announced to anyone who would listen that he and I were going on a walking holiday in the Swiss Alps. And on 28 June, we took a flight to Geneva.
25
THERE ARE SEVEN OF US sitting in the Cafe des Douanes, a hundred yards over the border from Swiss Geneva in France. Finn is sitting at the centre of a long red formica table. The other plastic chairs are occupied by the team he has gathered together in the past four years and who will now stick with him until the end.
It is the same cafe where Finn and the Troll first met to talk about the Plan back in the summer of 2000. I am not yet officially included in the team, being simply Finn’s trusted Russian girlfriend.
Finn persuaded, cajoled and, in one or two cases, even paid these members of his team to join him. He has at last come up with a plan of his own.
It is based on the work of all their efforts in the intervening years: digging into bank accounts, following money trails, gathering anecdotal and paper evidence from many absent sources, such as Sergei, who are outside the team. And, though only Finn and I are aware of this, all is being slowly guided by the hand of Mikhail, the ever- present ghost at the feast.
And there are others on this team of Finn’s, like Dieter, who are not present but who still give this curious loyalty that Finn commands and that has got us all to this point.
As for me, Finn has never asked me to do anything that might compromise my relations with the Forest. And, though I don’t yet know it, he will only ever ask me once.
Finn has named this meeting a partial ‘family reunion’. Family, as ever, is important to Finn, even if it is just a word. The gathering is a two-day excuse for eating and drinking and enjoying each other’s company. It is also a chance for Finn to praise and thank us, and to steel us all for the final push-to establish the purpose of Exodi.
Apart from Finn and me, there is Frank who sits solidly on one of the red plastic cafe banquettes, a slight smile playing in his eyes, wearing his old grey woollen coat even though it is hot inside the cafe. Frank is the immediate reason Finn has called us together. He rarely leaves Luxembourg but is making a rare trip to Geneva to attend an anti-money-laundering conference.
The Troll, just come in from the street where he’s been barking into a mobile phone, is now wearing a russet beard that starts an inch below his mouth, like an Amish, and winds up on either side of his face like a hairy chinstrap. The Troll is cultivating this beard until the job is finished and this is some kind of ritual for him.
Then there is a man I haven’t met before, a sixty-five-year-old Englishman named simply James. He wears a three-piece pin-striped suit and his boyish complexion, surrounded by coiffed silver hair, reflects a care for appearances. James lives in Andorra and is an old contact of Finn’s. Former special services, SAS, I guess, James has run a security business for the past twenty years, bugging and debugging buildings, negotiating with kidnappers, sifting through rubbish bins, helping clients who are the victims of
Then there is the Hungarian Willy, taking a summer break up in the mountains. Willy has come down from his hiking holiday to attend Finn’s impromptu meeting. He wears a red cravat with white spots around his neck and chomps on a Villiger cigar.
The sixth person present is a Swiss woman, an investigative journalist. There is a slight pause when Finn introduces her by this description. She is called Karin and has long blond hair. I can’t help wondering if she and Finn have had an affair in the past. I think it equally likely she is with Swiss Intelligence.
Karin is just finishing giving us all an account of her country’s exploits in central Asia.
‘Kazakhstan is known in Swiss banking circles as Helvetistan, so great is Swiss investment there,’ Karin says and I note that she flicks back her blond hair at the end of sentences. ‘Swiss bankers and politicians love Kazakhstan,’ she says. ‘It is rich in oil and gas and is run by the dictator Nazarbyev who conveniently answers to nobody but himself.’
Karin winds up her exposition with more flicks of her hair, which seem to irritate only me. ‘Swiss money pours into Nazarbyev’s coffers. The money is to buy his country’s votes at international forums where the Swiss need support, particularly in the area of banking secrecy. Nazarbyev votes with Switzerland at these legislative
