private fortune rather than his SIS pay, Adrian might look like a toothless catwalk panther, but underneath it all the animal core was still the same one that had driven him through Far Eastern jungles forty years before, where he’d shot or cut the throats of Commie insurgents, and saved the world from Putin’s KGB predecessors.
Adrian began to stoke his own righteous anger now, in preparation for the meeting with Sergei Limov, Putin’s go-between for this evening. More than three days it had taken Finn to die, thanks to Bykov, in the trunk of a car somewhere in Germany, it was said, though Finn’s body had been delivered anonymously to the British embassy in Berlin.
There’d been a note attached to Finn’s body, laid out respectfully on the back seat of a Cherokee Jeep, which was abandoned outside the embassy. The note was addressed to Adrian personally. “You betrayed him in life,” it said. “Honour him in death.”
Who would deliver a body, let alone one as hot as that one? And who was it, with Finn’s corpse on their hands, who dared express such anger—and such accuracy—at the steps of the British embassy? The note pointed him towards two people.
Adrian’s mind turned once again to Finn’s woman, Colonel Anna Resnikov. Was it she, Anna, formerly the youngest female colonel in the KGB, who had first betrayed her country, then run away with Finn and married him? Had she in cold fury delivered the dead body of her lover and, later, her husband? Trained to the highest degree you could reach in Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, she was more than capable of it—she possessed all the cunning and subterfuge needed to pull off a feat like that.
Or, more interestingly perhaps, Adrian wondered, was it Mikhail who had slyly delivered Finn’s body?
Over the previous Friday afternoon, before he went down to Penny’s country house for the weekend, for another boring Saturday-night dinner party with her friends, Adrian had read through Mikhail’s file once again, even though he knew it almost by heart.
Code name Mikhail had approached Finn in February 1995 in Moscow, where Finn was using the cover of the British second secretary for trade and investment at the embassy. Right from the start, Mikhail would talk only to Finn. That was the deal. From day one, code name Mikhail was adamant that he would communicate with—and be known to—nobody else, and so Finn’s strategic importance had rocketed.
For the next five years, Mikhail had fed the highest quality intelligence to the British, via Finn. It was so good that it had kept the British right up there, sitting at the high table with the Americans, for a while.
And then, in 2000, Vladimir Putin ascended to power in a well-planned KGB coup. Mikhail was so close to Putin that—as Finn put it—“he practically shits in Putin’s bathroom.” Mikhail was one of the tiny group of so-called Patriots deep within Putin’s innermost circle. The quality, the importance, of his information was greater than ever.
But at that moment, politics back home intervened. The prime minister insisted that Vladimir Putin was a man he could do business with. The American president George W. Bush added the honorarium that he had “looked into Putin’s soul” and liked what he saw.
Suddenly Mikhail’s warnings about Putin’s Russia were off-message. The politicians didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Under orders from Downing Street, the SIS was told that Mikhail must be dropped—exposed as a fraud, was the method the politicians suggested. And so Adrian—promotion and a knighthood at the front of his mind—followed orders. Mikhail was excised.
But Finn hadn’t followed orders. He left the SIS, rather than see his priceless source trashed for reasons of political expediency. And Anna defected from Russia, just for him, not for some cause, and they married. A love story, Adrian supposed, if such a thing existed.
For the next six years, the two of them and a team Finn put together, financed from Russian exiles’ money, independently pursued Mikhail’s leads, which the British refused to touch. And Mikhail’s material was as good as it had ever been. It was so hot, in fact, that Finn had been murdered for it.
The British government’s craving to be on friendly terms with Vladimir Putin had cost Britain and the West five years of high-level intelligence. But it had cost Finn his life.
Now, there was a new twist. The wheel had turned full circle. At the dawn of 2008 politics intervened for a second time, and the attitude to Putin’s regime had gone into reverse. It turned out you couldn’t do business with Putin, after all, and there was apparently nothing very nice to be seen in his soul, if indeed he had one. Orders went out that Mikhail was to be rehabilitated. “Find Mikhail” was the cry.
But with Finn dead, and former colonel Anna Resnikov disappeared, nobody knew how to contact Mikhail.
One of the many reasons for the new policy towards Russia was Finn’s assassination and its aftermath. Grigory Bykov’s reward for the murder of a British intelligence officer was the title of Hero of the Russian Federation—Russia’s highest award—and a seat in Russia’s parliament, the Duma. These days, the Russians made their killers MPs.
Adrian looked at the road ahead and broke away from his thoughts for a moment.
“Foot down, Ray,” he demanded. They were on the motorway, and the traffic had stretched itself apart.
“There’s a weather speed limit, sir,” Ray objected.
“Never mind the bloody speed limit.”
Adrian settled back in his seat. Something else—now it was the damn speed limit—was getting in his way.
Adrian was not planning to be as generous to Grigory Bykov as the Kremlin had been. He hadn’t spent fourteen months finding Bykov, in order to have a British diplomatic rap over the knuckles administered to the Russian ambassador.
At a claret-fuelled encounter with the Perrier-drinking Teddy Parkinson, the Joint Intelligence chief, at the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, Adrian had demanded Bykov’s life. “An eye for an eye . . . just as it should be, always has been, and always shall be, Teddy.”
To return murder for murder was, after all, the standard procedure. An intelligence officer had been the victim, and MI6, Adrian’s Secret Intelligence Service, was not to be viewed as a patsy. That would be tantamount to inviting future acts of murder against SIS officers, not to mention a savage blow to the morale of Finn’s colleagues.
Nevertheless Adrian had known that he would need to lobby Teddy Parkinson hard and cleverly to obtain this natural justice. A British government that could blithely march its armies to slaughter in Iraq—against an abstract enemy and on the basis of false information, to boot—was surprisingly squeamish when it came to dealing death to an actual person; a person with a name and an identity. No matter that the evidence against Bykov was overwhelmingly clear. Without a doubt, the state-sponsored, state-trained, and state-armed Russian hood had murdered Finn, a British intelligence officer.
And so Adrian had entertained Teddy on his own ground at the Special Forces Club, where the beneficial results of force were everywhere in evidence; in the photographs of heroes on its walls, in the letters written in the blood of Gestapo torture victims who had died rather than give up British secrets. The club was a place where bureaucrats like Teddy were viewed with, at best, suspicion.
Adrian, florid of face and with a pugnacious tenacity to match, wanted to show his superior what intelligence work at the sharp end was really about. Unlike himself, Teddy had never been in the armed forces, and dealing with Grigory Bykov was going to be brute work. In his own take-no-prisoners diplomatic style, Adrian had wanted to remind Teddy of both of these facts.
“But he’s a Russian MP, Adrian,” Teddy had pointed out with exasperation, when Adrian, displeased at not getting his demands immediately met, was rounding off lunch with a serviceable cognac. “It makes things complicated,” Parkinson reasoned.
“That’s why they made him an MP, isn’t it? So we would back off,” Adrian insisted, leaning right in across the table so that Parkinson almost flinched. “Are we going to let rogue states go around assassinating our officers just because the KGB turns its murderers into MPs?”
“Russia is not a rogue state, Adrian,” Parkinson said mildly.
“It just smells like one, looks like one, and acts like one,” Adrian said. “What if it had been Syrian intelligence who had murdered Finn? Would we be pussyfooting off to the Middle East requesting a fair trial?”
Parkinson had dutifully delivered to Adrian the message from the prime minister’s office. First, before extreme measures were even contemplated, they were to demand Bykov’s extradition at intelligence level, away from the media. That way the Russians had the opportunity to ditch Bykov without losing face.
