Red to Black by Alex Dryden Page B

their encouragement to think freely had landed him a ten-year exile in the Cape Verde Islands.
    ‘But be careful,’ Patrushev said slowly, as if reading my thoughts. ‘Remember where his independence, unbridled, undisciplined, seems to have got him.’ For a moment I was confused as to whether he was talking about Vladimir or Finn. ‘Independent thought is not anarchic thought,’ Patrushev explained.
    ‘No, sir,’ I said, though that seemed to me to be exactly what it was.
    ‘But first, let’s get some tea,’ he said to nobody in particular and Kerchenko gave the order with a nod of his head to Sacha who picked up the phone and called for tea.
    ‘I like all your reports, Anna,’ Patrushev said. The use of my name again made me increasingly wary. ‘They are a mix of the factual and personal. They have insight.’
    I judged that I had thanked him enough by now.
    ‘But no one, no one can get everything into a report. The apparently unimportant comment, the throwaway line, the nuance, the remark that seems to mean something but means something else. And, simply, the forgotten. All that could amount to a whole volume for a twenty-minute conversation, as I’m sure you’re aware.’
    He then went back over a dozen of my reports on Finn, apparently at random, which had been submitted by me over the past twelve months. The tea arrived, and it was drunk. Kerchenko looked impatient but also seemed to be struggling to control it. The other two were bored and looked as if they wanted something stronger than tea.
    We must have spent two hours meticulously treading back over old ground, dissecting a sentence here, a glimpse of behaviour there. Patrushev showed no sign of tiring. Then he finally closed the files and put his elbows on the desk and looked at me. Was the meeting over or was this simply a change of tack?
    Out of the blue he said, ‘Let’s talk about Finn.’ He simply said Finn. We’d never used anything but Markus.
    The other three men in the room looked aghast and then confused. Proper procedure had suddenly been obliterated and they didn’t understand.
    I felt my stomach drop and a horrible void open up in its place. I closed my eyes.
    As Markus, Finn was always, to me, at a convenient distance in my reports. I was informing on Markus, not Finn. The two had become separated. To me, Markus was almost another person, Finn’s professional doppelgänger. But I understood immediately why Patrushev had dropped this bombshell. We were no longer to talk about a target of Russian intelligence, but about a relationship, mine and Finn’s.
    I remember, presumably when I had opened my eyes again, seeing Patrushev watching from the other side of the desk. His face expressed a non-committal curiosity.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, as if he had seen some answer in my reaction. ‘Let’s talk about Finn.’
    And so, for the next hour or so, we talked about Finn, right back to the earliest reports on him, right back to the beginning.
    Of course, much of it had appeared already in the dossier, both from before I knew Finn and from my own reports. But Patrushev wanted what was behind the facts. We strayed increasingly from the area of intelligence into assessment.
    Looking only at Patrushev, I began to talk about what I knew of Finn’s childhood.
     
    Finn had told me about it on a trip to Irkutsk in Siberia. He was visiting the city to look over a British investment there in his Trade and Industry role and he asked me to accompany him. He had a surprise for me. We arrived in Irkutsk on a bleak afternoon in January when the temperature was minus twenty-five degrees and he went at once to the offices of a gold-mining company, a joint venture between British and Russian investors. It was a Friday. When he returned to the hotel, he said, ‘Now we have the weekend to ourselves, Rabbit. I’ve booked a place up on Lake Baikal. That’s the surprise,’ he said delightedly.
    He’d arranged the business trip in order to spend the