When he finally emerged and walked out into the sun, Slava the Russian, as he liked to be known, was dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a white T-shirt. Barefoot and unshaven, he stood on the deck, stretched, looked at the sky, then finally glanced down at his guest. It seemed to Lars that he wanted to demonstrate that he’d been sleeping. It bordered on disrespectful.
Rivera stood and shook hands with the Russian. Lars saw the words of greeting pass between them and then a joke, followed by a short laugh from Slava.
Levelling the rifle, Lars squatted with his back hard against the rear balustrade. It was uncomfortable, and he didn’t want to hold the position for long. But by the time he had gotten comfortable and squinted down the rifle scope again, he saw that a party of bodyguards and crew were descending the steps again towards the launch. The target and Rivera were still on deck, but walking away into the door from which the target had just emerged.
Lars watched the launch take off. It did a couple of sweeps of the yacht and then seemed to be widening its area of observation. Two of the guards were training binoculars on the beach, on other boats, and towards the monastery itself. Lars pulled the inch or two of barrel that might be visible back inside the balustrade, making the shot impossible now. He was too cramped with the trigger up this close.
He withdrew the rifle completely and screwed on the silencer.
The launch widened its circle and finally came to rest a hundred yards away from the island, only a hundred and fifty yards from the bell tower. It sat there, rolling gently from its own motion rather than any great movement in the water.
Lars dared not use the scope while it was there. Its antireflective lens was no guarantee, and the sun was coming at more of an angle every twenty minutes or so.
Then the launch started its engine and made its way in loops back towards the yacht.
Lars turned the scope onto the deck of the yacht. The target and Rivera were standing at the top of the steps now. Two more launches had been lowered, or withdrawn from some internal dock at the stern. The deck seemed to be teeming with men in dark glasses, phones wired to their ears. There was activity all around Rivera and Slava the Russian, who stood there, apparently oblivious to the commotion around him, a man accustomed to being waited on by dozens of acolytes. Slava lit a cigar from a proffered humidor. Rivera declined his offer of another.
The three launches were gathered now at the foot of the steps. Slava ushered Rivera down the steps first, and then followed himself. They stepped into the first launch, which waited with idling engines for the guards to fill the other two. When all were aboard, the three launches set off.
Lars assumed they’d be going to the town—for a late lunch perhaps; a restaurant reserved outright by Slava, as was his custom. But then he saw they were coming right towards him, straight at the island, directly into the sights of the rifle. Slava the target was dead ahead. Lars’s heart thumped against his chest. They were coming to the monastery.
He broke into a sweat. He could stay where he was, wait and see. Or he could pack up and join the others down below for the return trip across the isthmus. If the Russians came, there was a risk that they would insist on opening up the bell tower, no matter that it was closed for repairs. They would donate some huge sum of money to the monastery, just for the pleasure of going to the forbidden. That was how these Russians were. Show them a forbidden entrance, and that was the only place they wanted to go.
He could disappear in the tourist bus. Or he could shoot now.
Gently, he pushed the rifle through the gap in the stone balustrade and picked up the first launch through the scope. It was rising and falling as the engines cut deeply into the water. It was a straight shot, with the movement up and down only. He didn’t think long. He didn’t have time. He zeroed again for the reducing distance and fired.
Through the rifle scope, he saw the first launch suddenly fall from its rearing advance down onto its bow, pushing the water ahead of it as it lost way. The other two launches shot ahead, then saw what had happened and swerved in towards each other in tight circles, returning fast to the first launch. Lars saw Slava the Russian, Slava the target. He seemed to have been punched in the chest, hit squarely by the .50-calibre shell and knocked over the seat and into the stern.
Lars levelled the rifle again. He had the zero this time. Same distance. One boat was stopped in front of Slava’s launch, idling its engine. Lars fired his second shot. It entered the engine of the boat, shattering it.
The skipper of the third boat now jammed its throttle into forward gear. Its engine raced, and its prop churned the water. Lars’s third shot hit the upper pins that clamped the outboard engine to the top of the transom. Held only by the pins at its lower edge, the wildly racing engine snapped back from its fixture; the propeller rammed upwards, screaming through the water and up into the wooden hull. Gouging easily through the hull, it shot up into the crowded boat.
There was chaos, blood flying, screams. The boat flew out of control.
He had two more shots left in the magazine. He fired one towards the engine of the target’s launch, but it was still face on, the engine sheltered by the rest of the boat from where Lars was crouched. He decided to aim the last shot at the engine a second time, and prayed a second time.
The last of the scene he witnessed in the bay was a wild, scrambled pandemonium of bodies and arms. There were two men still intact enough to be making desperate phone calls. Lars didn’t know any more than that, as he swiftly unscrewed the silencer, then the barrel, thrust the rest of the equipment into the pack, and headed back down the steps. The shadows had crept over the stone steps beneath his feet, changing their colour from honey to grey.
At the foot of the stairs, he gently pushed the bolt back and unlocked the door. The two Americans saw him exit. The woman with her pinched face stared at him; the man looked embarrassed, afraid even, as if he knew they had no business looking. Lars pinned the No Entry tape back over the door. There was a different group entering now, from another run of the bus across the isthmus. At least they hadn’t seen him on the bus, as the American couple had. They stared at him, but he lowered his eyes and walked past them.
He crossed himself briefly in front of the Virgin’s picture, avoiding Her eyes too, and walked out of the monastery’s entrance into the blinding sunshine. He heard a distant sound: engines starting. Passing the small chapel of Saint Sava, under the cypress, where the chickens had a new sprinkling of food to pick at, he headed to the south shore.
On the pile of rocks that made up the southern breakwater of the island, he unslung his backpack, reached inside, and removed the small air bottle, then the micro aqualung and a pair of fins. The engine sound was growing. He looked back over his shoulder and saw that a helicopter had left the deck of the
Aurora
and was heading for the launches, which wallowed uselessly in the perfect sea.
Lars carefully descended through the tumbled rocks to the water, dragging the backpack with him. He picked out two of the smaller rocks under the water, broken off from the huge ones, and put them into the pack, then towed it and himself into the sea. He glanced back. He couldn’t see the launches down here, but he saw the helicopter sweeping towards the island. Stumbling down the rocks, he slid under the water.
He swam heavily and clumsily with the pack in one hand down to the lowest of the piled rocks. He drew a waterproof packet out of the pack—his passport and money—and then shoved the pack under a rock until it was wedged fast. He rolled several other smaller rocks over it until it was invisible.
Then he set out beneath the sea.
Only now did he try to slow his panicked breathing, to conserve the precious air. He had only five litres, not enough for his liking. He wouldn’t make the three and a half miles to the promontory, that was certain, not with all the exertion. He’d have to come in to land earlier.
A
NNA SAT ACROSS A
blue-painted wooden table in the Restaurant des Alpilles and took a sip from the glass of Sancerre Willy had ordered.
“Cheers,” Willy said, and they drank together. “Happy birthday, my dear.” He looked at her. It had been only three weeks since they’d last met, but he was always looking to make a compliment. “You’re looking so French, Anna,” he said, and smiled. “After just a year in the village. Like one of those women in the magazines. Chic, and as beautiful as ever. Happy birthday!” He raised his glass, and they drank.
“Thank you, Willy. You should see me normally,” she replied. “Dungarees and grass in my hair.”
“You look good whatever you wear,” he insisted. “You look well too.” He put his hand over hers on the table and squeezed it.
Willy was a good man. “A dependable Hungarian”—that was how Finn had described him before she and Willy had met, with a heavy emphasis on “dependable.” And he was smart too. “You know what they say about the Hungarians, Anna,” Finn had once said to her. “They come into the revolving door behind you and come out ahead of you.”
She noticed that still, two years after Finn’s death, she continued inwardly to refer to Finn’s opinions.
She, Finn, and Willy had lived through a lot together. She didn’t need Finn’s opinion of Willy to know she could rely on him. He was the last thing left standing after the hurricane of Finn’s death; a man rooted into her life, into the earth itself. In his seventy-two years, more than fifty of them in the West, he had developed a tanned leanness, with a fierce sparkle in his eyes that looked directly at her out of a face lined like a woodcut. He had supported her in the past two years, and before that too, before Finn died even. He had been an undemanding friend and father figure, always there for her if she called. Just as he’d always been there for Finn.
She tried to imagine him as the handsome youth of more than fifty years before, when he’d fled from Hungary after Russian tanks entered Budapest in ’56. Back then, his country’s brief leap for freedom was crushed. He had fought on the barricades, retreated, fought again until it was almost too late, survived, and escaped intact.
In the West, the British had eventually recruited him. He’d made more than twenty trips across the Iron Curtain, Finn had told her, but he swiftly became disillusioned. Willy had thought the West was fighting for Hungary’s freedom, but, like other refugees from the East, he was to be disappointed. Hungary was just a walk-on part in the geopolitical game of the Cold War.
Willy was important to her, she realised, not for the first time. He wasn’t just her last link to Finn; he was a mirror for her own survival as an exile.
“How’s my godson?” Willy asked.
“He’s loving life, Willy. Every minute of it. Maybe he’s a little self-absorbed sometimes, but I consider that to be a good thing. He finds out things for himself.”
“He needs a man in his life, Anna. He’s surrounded by women. You, the school . . .”
She laughed. Willy was always trying to get her fixed up with various “safe” men under the guise of it being right for Little Finn. He had a straightforward view of the relationship between men and women, but without the arrogance she knew in many men from the East.
She and Willy had married shortly after Finn had died, but it was only for her security. He was more than thirty years older than her, after all. But she’d easily agreed that their friendship justified this arrangement. She was able to have a new name, a new identity, until she’d been able to broker the deal with the French and do it properly.
“I mean it. He needs a man,” Willy repeated adamantly.
“But not any man,” she stated.
His eyes narrowed. She knew the look. It preceded something artful.
“What about you, then? Get yourself a new man, why not?” Willy changed tack, his easy smile not quite concealing the old-fashioned attitude behind it. “You’re young, you’re beautiful, you shouldn’t be alone all the time,” he pressed her.
“Like . . . get a new sofa, you mean?” she said. “Or get a new car?”
“Well . . .” Willy wasn’t sure this wasn’t such a bad comparison.
“Look, Willy, I’m happy as things are. And if I weren’t, why would a man be the antidote?”
“Are you angry with Finn? Is that it? Do you feel he betrayed you?”
“Finn never betrayed anyone but himself.”
“And you and the boy were collateral damage.”
She smiled at the aggressive chess game of his thoughts, always pushing the pieces out at her.
“Not necessarily, Willy,” she replied. “It’s all a matter of how you perceive it. Do I look damaged?”
“No. But you’re tough, Anna. Maybe you’re too tough sometimes for your own good. You can sit there and tell me, ‘It’s just a matter of how you perceive it.’ What kind of thinking is that? It’s not reality.”
“Reality is exactly what it is. It’s that kind of thinking, Willy.”
“But romance . . . !” Willy protested. He was off again, a new tack, new methods of persuasion. “What about a little physical comfort? What’s wrong with some fun? Eh?”
She laughed. “You’re the old devil, Willy, not me.”
“Romance never let me down,” Willy insisted. “It’s been like water in the desert.”
“So it’s some unalloyed good then, is it?” she replied. “No, Willy. There’s good romance and bad romance, same as anything else. Read the poets. Anyway, maybe you should ask some of your exes how great their romances were. Or would it take too long?”
“You’re cheeky and you are tough,
édesem
. Thank God I only have to be married to you.”
She laughed. She liked it when he called her “sweetheart” in his own language.
“You’ll frighten men away with that kind of talk,” he insisted. “You want to be the Virgin Queen?”
“If the alternative is frightened men, yes. Finn was never frightened of anything.”
“Ah, Finn.” Willy shook his head, suddenly quiet, and made no attempt to hide his deep sadness from her. She liked that about him too, that he was honest with his feelings and didn’t try to protect her from them. “Finn was a beautiful man,” he said.
“And a fool in almost equal amounts,” she added.
“I understand. You’re not over him. I apologise.”
She smiled and held his hand.
“You have nothing to apologise for, Willy. You’ve loved us both.”
A waitress brought them a
pissaladière
and some salad and filled their glasses.
It was true. She wasn’t over Finn; he was never far from her thoughts. How could she be over him? Finn was the reason she had left everything—Russia her home, her past, her roots, her people. Her Year Zero was 1999—the year she’d met Finn. She’d made the most of the men in her life up to then, but Finn was the only one she’d ever truly loved.
And Finn was never far away, even two years after his death. He had been a part of her life for just seven years, until they’d finally got to him. She and Finn had seven years of almost permanent tension, some of it bad, but most of it was good, the beautiful tension of being in constant awareness of each other.
They’d met in a setup, an arrangement between the KGB on her side and MI6 on his.
In 1999, he had been encouraged by his station head in Moscow to strike up an affair with her, while she in turn had been instructed by her SVR boss to do the same. Up to then, the KGB had failed at all their attempts to entrap Finn, and so she, the youngest female KGB colonel—a beauty in her own right, she was accustomed to hearing—had, much against her will, taken the job. She was no honey-trap, but a senior officer at the heart of the KGB’s foreign operations. She had worked inside the SVR, and right at the heart of the SVR itself, in the highly secret Department S.
But after 2000, when Putin became president, she had been told why Finn had remained in Moscow for so long. There was a mole, a double agent—a traitor—close to power in Putin’s circle, and Finn was believed to have sole access to him. Find the traitor—that was her patriotic assignment.
She recalled Finn’s last conversation with Adrian, his recruiter in London; how Adrian had threatened and cajoled and finally issued an ultimatum to Finn to stop his investigations. But Finn had pursued his own line, and met with his death in Paris, after he was betrayed.
She looked across the table at Willy. It was Willy who had saved them, before Finn chose to take his final step. She and Finn had hidden out in a beach hut at Willy’s driftwood restaurant on the most unwanted, unattractive stretch of sand near Marseille. Only the hippies and drifters went to Willy’s beach, and even they had to be vetted by him.
Those were the happy days, hot in summer, cold in winter, in a windswept hut hidden behind the dunes, which themselves were hidden across miles of unwelcoming salt flats. Willy had kept them successfully away from prying eyes.
“What is worrying you, then, if your life is so good?” Willy said, interrupting her thoughts, bringing her back to the present.
She didn’t reply, but looked into his eyes.
“Tell me,” he said. “I see a cloud.”
“Someone came to the house,” she answered finally. “On Saturday. A neighbour saw him.”
She saw Willy immediately become practical; no anxiety, no sympathy, just analysis.
“Not a caller, then?” he said.
“No. He just looked, came right up to the gate and looked through.”
“Maybe noting your car?” Willy said.
“Possibly, yes.”
“You have a description?”
“Not a useful one.”
“And in the village? A car? How did he get there?”
“I haven’t asked anyone, and the man who told me didn’t know.”
“Someone will likely have seen it,” Willy said. “In these villages, that’s what they do, look out for invaders. That’s what they’ve been doing for a thousand years. It’s in their blood.”
“I only heard just before I came to see you,” she said.
“You’ve told your French security?”
“No.”
“You should have.”
“There’s nothing to say.”
“Yes, there is. I’m coming back with you, staying there tonight. Maybe we can find out more.”
“That will certainly set tongues wagging,” she said, and laughed.
“Hell, we’re married! I claim my rights!” he joked. “And I want to see my little godson. I have something for him. Just a small present.”
They drove back after lunch, across the low, olive-rich hills of the Alpilles with their neat stone farmhouses and perfect villages.
They didn’t talk much as she drove. Willy saw she was carrying the gun and simply nodded approvingly. Anna felt tense. She realised she was anxious being away from her son with the unsolved knowledge of this unwelcome visitor. Willy spoke once, when they were nearing the village. It was as if he’d been unwilling to raise the subject.
“Have you told them about Mikhail, Anna?”
“Them?”
“The French? Or anybody else?”
“No, Willy. Mikhail is all I have to keep me safe.”
“And all you need to get you into deep shit too,” he said.
She didn’t reply.
She had told nobody about Mikhail. Mikhail . . . Finn’s great source, who couldn’t be discredited, no matter what they said in London. Mikhail was true.
And she had told nobody—not even Willy—that she alone knew who Mikhail really was. Alone in the world, she knew Mikhail’s identity, and only Mikhail knew she knew it. That was trust, trust on a scale that dwarfed even her trust in Willy, and in Finn himself. Mikhail was so big, so important. He walked such a narrow tightrope at the heart of Putin’s elite.
She’d wondered more than once why Mikhail hadn’t killed her the one time they’d met, and she’d seen who he was. That was trust on a scale that was unimaginable to her.
Back in Germany, it was Mikhail who had found Finn, when she had been unable to. She had told nobody this. And she had told nobody that after Mikhail found Finn, he’d found her too, in the pink house in Germany, so that she could see Finn one last time before he died.
Finn had never told her Mikhail’s true identity. It was for her own protection, he said. And then, on the night of his death, she saw Mikhail.
Mikhail was the gold seam for whoever found him; his enemies in Russia, or his so-called friends in the West. And when Mikhail had revealed himself to her, he had somehow known that she would never reveal his identity. He knew she could have had anything she wanted by revealing that, even her route back to Russia, if she’d wanted it.
That was a trust never to be broken, even with Willy.
When they reached the village, they saw the children playing in the sun-browned garden at the rear of the crèche. She saw her son, and her heart slowed. As they’d approached the village, she realised she’d become increasingly afraid, imagining everything.
But he was there, falling off a red plastic structure into the sand, over and over again, laughing more and more, and urging his friends to do the same. She recalled that he’d told her in complete seriousness, three days before, that he was going to marry Amandine, aged three.
She and Willy took him from the teachers, who were reluctant to give him up. Willy hoisted him onto his shoulders, and he waved good-bye to the women. They loved him, Anna saw. Sometimes he was painfully like his father.
The three of them walked back up the lane to the house.
“Call them now,” Willy said. “The first thing you do is call your security. You won’t get rid of me until they’re here.”
“I’ll do that,” she said. But she was angry that after so many months of freedom from anxiety, it should all have washed back into her life—into their lives.
Willy had given Little Finn an ant house. While they played with it in the garden, she called her contact in Paris.
The man listened to her story. He didn’t seem to feel any urgency. That was how the French were, she thought. Unlike the British, who injected urgency into anything, the French sucked it out. She wasn’t sure at first if he was taking her seriously, but she’d come to know the way they worked.
“When will you send a team down here?” she asked.
“A team? I don’t know. But someone will come today—I promise you. We’ll take care of everything.”