Alex Dryden - Red to Black

I lie silently and put my hand under the blanket to hold on to Finn’s hand.

‘So Finn hired a car in France and drove to Luxembourg. He didn’t tell me what happened between him and Frank. But he left the hired car in Luxembourg and took a train out, following all the field rules. He hired another car when he thought he was clear. But somehow they kept a tail on him, he didn’t know how. During the night in Paris, they got to the car in the underground car park where he’d left it, over a mile away from the hotel. That’s how it happened.’

I stay silent. I don’t know where anything goes from here. And I think that soon I will be the only person alive who knows who Mikhail is.

‘He knew he was ill the following night, but he didn’t know why,’ Mikhail said. ‘His heart was weakening already. He knew they’d got him.’

‘And you found him.’

‘Eventually.’

I didn’t ask Mikhail how he could find Finn when I couldn’t.

Finn died during that long night in the back of the car. He didn’t regain consciousness.

THERE IS ONLYone photograph of Mikhail in the public domain, and in it his face is so obscured that you’d have to know it was him in order to identify him. He is hidden behind the face of Vladimir Putin.

The picture was taken at a small service in the Kremlin’s Orthodox chapel on an afternoon in late 2004. Mikhail is in the pew right behind the President; only his ear and a small fraction of his face are visible. He is in a place of high honour in this picture. Yet Mikhail is a minor official in the Railways Ministry in Moscow, on the export side, but he uses this cover to travel widely in Europe for his real work: overseeing the continent’s SVR presence. Mikhail is at the centre of power. He was there at the heart of Department ‘S’ before Putin, and he has risen with Putin from the beginning of Putin’s own rise to power. Mikhail is everything that Finn said he was, and that Adrian denied.

In the summer of 2007 the Service held a memorial service for Finn, six months after his death. I received an invitation from Adrian, via the roundabout mailing route that Finn had set up and which still seemed to be working. Once in a while, Willy picked up Finn’s mail from a box Finn owned in Monaco.

But I didn’t go to Finn’s memorial. It wasn’t a service for lovers or wives, it was a service designed to draw a veil over how they’d treated Finn in life, not in order to respect him in death. I believe Finn was awarded some posthumous honour to complete the fiction.

Our son was born a few weeks later. We called him Finn, Willy and I, and Willy was his ‘father’, he told me, in all but fact. He said that his family lived long and that he would live to see my son grow into his twenties. He would take care of me, he promised, as a father, as a friend, and as a guardian.

Willy and I married, in order for me to have a new name and French nationality, and despite the fact that Willy was always trying to get me to meet men my own age. It was a marriage of convenience, between friends. It was from necessity but it was a bond of sorts too.

In the spring and summer of 2007, Putin railed against the West. He cut off oil supplies to the EU country of Estonia, under the pretence of a broken pipeline, but in reality in revenge for the Estonians removing a memorial to Russian soldiers, Estonia’s oppressors and occupiers. Russian jet-fighters buzzed European airspace and Putin announced a new weapons’ build-up; what used to be called an arms’ race.

The Europeans reacted feebly; America stood up to Russia. The Europeans became more and more afraid of Russia and its oil supply. Its leaders and former leaders cosied up to the Kremlin, either for personal gain or out of fear. And Putin, like Peter the Great in his written military statutes, now ‘answered to nobody in the world’.

And Adrian, I thought, was right. The power of America would take care of its own, and if you were lucky enough to be able to hang on to America’s coat-tails, it wasn’t such a bad place to be.

We, Willy and I, and other emigrants from the East whom we met from time to time in Paris, seemed to understand this better than Western Europe’s complacent or corrupt indigenous peoples.

Finn’s romantic view of what was right, and what was actually possible, was designed for some other kind of world. But eventually, what broke Finn was his inability to change. I finally found the power to choose what was good, what was right, for me. But Finn could not quite bring himself to say: ‘I’m on my side.’

Thank you to the many people in Russia and the former Soviet republics, who helped with this book and who wish to remain nameless.

ALEX DRYDENis a writer and journalist with many years of experience covering security matters. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Dryden watched the statues of Lenin fall across the former Soviet Union. Since then he has charted the false dawn of democracy in Russia as the country has transformed into the world’s most powerful secret state.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.