He refills the cups and lifts his again for another toast.
‘And to Finn,’ he says. ‘Himself, in some ways, a beautiful child.’
And I hear myself repeat it. To Finn. And I drink to the bottom of the cup and cry inside.
A toast is the Georgian way of expressing more than a thousand words can ever express. It is a method of communicating the impossible in that country.
And then Mikhail downs his empty cup. He puts his hand inside his jacket again and withdraws a long dagger from a pocket, but I sit there with no thought of running. Just for a moment, I actually want to be released.
But Mikhail puts the knife on the table between us. It is a kidjal, a Caucasian dagger, and it has an inscription on it.
‘Pick it up. Look at it,’ Mikhail says.
I do so, and written on the blade is an inscription. ‘I will protect you, both in the day and in the night,’ it reads.
‘Finn gave it to me,’ Mikhail says. ‘It is the dagger’s word and it is Finn’s word. He kept his word. And now I want you to have it. It’s now my word. I’ll keep my word to you too, Anna.’
Mikhail stands up and puts the flask and the cups back into his pockets. I pick up the dagger and place it in my bag and do up the zipper.
‘We must go,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how much time we have.’
He leads the way through to the kitchen and the back door and looks out over the lake. I follow him with the bag of Finn’s books and the microfiches.
I’ve never opened the back door out from the kitchen, I don’t know how Mikhail got to it, but I see there’s a lawn outside the door that leads down to the lake.
When he seems satisfied with his observation, he opens the door and we walk down the lawn to a small launch tied to a post. He takes my bags and places them gently next to the seat that he guides me to. Then he gets into the launch himself and starts an outboard. I untie the painter from the post and the boat swings around gently with the motor idling and then he accelerates away from the pink house across the lake. I look back at the widening wake, and the pink house disappearing into the distance.
We reach the other side. He ties the boat up and puts my bags on to a jetty as I climb out. He lets me carry them then, so that I know he isn’t going to take them away. Then we walk up the jetty and to a lock-up garage on the far side of the road. Mikhail lifts the door and unlocks a green car, a Cherokee Jeep, I think, inside the garage, and he opens the passenger door for me.
The back seats are folded down and Finn is lying with his eyes closed on what seems to be an inflatable camping mattress and he is covered up to his neck in blankets. I see a drip attached into his arm and smell morphine.
As Mikhail moves the car away from the kerb I see him look back across the lake and I follow his gaze. On the far side, where we’ve just come from, the lazy blue light of a police car is slowly passing along the road that runs by the edge of the water.
‘We must go,’ he says.
I look down at Finn and I see that he is alive.
‘Why isn’t he in hospital?’ I demand. ‘Why is he lying in this damn car!’
Mikhail doesn’t reply.
‘Are we going to hospital?’ I hear the edge of a scream in my voice.
‘He has a few hours, Anna.’
‘Get him to a fucking hospital, then!’ I scream at him, leaning over the front seat in rage. But he drives into the gathering dusk and I don’t know where we’re going.
‘Finn stayed at a hotel in Paris,’ he says at last. ‘Days ago, eight, ten- I don’t know. He hired a car. French police and security have taken his room to pieces and found nothing. That’s because what they were looking for was in the car. They, our people, put a nerve agent on the steering wheel. We don’t know what nerve agent it is. Even if we did, it was too late by the time I found him. If there is an antidote, we won’t be able to find it. He knew that too. He asked me to bring him here.’
I don’t say anything, but sink back on to the floor next to Finn and watch his upturned face and listen to his laboured, infrequent breathing.
‘If he wakes, use the time well,’ Mikhail says.
We drive in silence, in darkness. I am lying next to Finn, sometimes on one elbow looking at his face, sometimes on my back, like him, looking at the roof of the car. We might both have been corpses then.
‘What happened?’ I say after I don’t know how long. We are passing under some street lights, I am on my back, and the lights are beaming through the window, illuminating the interior of the car like a lethargic stroboscope.
‘He told me he went to see the man Frank.’ Mikhail pauses.
‘Yes?’
‘It was to confront him.’
‘About what?’
‘Finn told me he’d looked back over months, over years, and found a pattern. The photographs you told him about, the ones they showed you in Moscow…On all the occasions photographs were taken, since Geneva, Frank was the link. In Geneva he was there. In France, he was there. In Basle, when you and Finn were taken together at the railway station, the only other person who knew you’d be there was Frank. Finn had telephoned him, if you remember. I think he telephoned Frank back then to confirm his suspicions. To see if there’d be a photograph. And there was.
‘He tried to forget this, Anna. He tried to forget because he was genuine about finishing with all of this, about putting it behind him and making a life with you. But one thing he couldn’t forget was four years ago, in Luxembourg, and the boy’s death. When he left the boy’s flat, he’d been meticulous, he knew his job. And he knew that he wasn’t observed entering or leaving the building. Knew as far as anyone can know, anyway. But with all the other evidence, the photographs, he knew that Frank also was the only person who knew he’d seen the boy. He was certain of that. And therefore he was certain that Frank was the cause of the boy’s death. He couldn’t forget that. He couldn’t let that go. He had to hear it from Frank himself. That’s why he went to Luxembourg. That was the loose end he had to tie up. He couldn’t let it rest.’
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.
EPILOGUE
THERE IS ONLY one 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.