Chapter Thirty-three

ALL THOSE YEARS ago, the division had arrived at the jetty in force. Just after sunset, eight operatives, casually dressed, a few with backpacks, had come down the coast on a decent little cruiser.

They looked like a group of youngish guys out for a good time. I wasn’t among them: as the junior member of the team, my job had been to arrive separately, take charge of a specially purchased van, drive to the small bluff and park as close as possible to the abandoned kiosk. In the event that something went wrong, I was to evacuate whoever needed it to another boat waiting at a Bodrum marina. In the worst-case scenario, I was then to drive the wounded to a doctor who was on standby for just such an emergency.

I was inexperienced, and I remembered that I had a lot of fear on me that night: we had come to the furthest reaches of Turkey to kill a man.

His name was Finlay Robert Finlay – that wasn’t his real name, his real name was Russian, but that was what we knew him by – an overweight guy in his late forties who had a big appetite for everything, including treachery. He had been a young consular official working in the Russians’ Cairo Embassy when the CIA managed to turn him. Apart from paying him a handsome monthly retainer, the agency did nothing with him: he was a sleeper, and they let him go happily about his life and whoring, content to watch him climb the ladder. He was a bright man, so it was no surprise that, after a number of years, he became the KGB station chief in Tehran, working under deep diplomatic cover.

It was then that the agency decided it wanted a return on its investment. They were sensible and they only took from him the highest-quality intelligence and insisted that he didn’t take any unreasonable risks. They had lavished too much of their love and gold on him to jeopardize it by being greedy. He quickly became one of the agency’s prime assets, and they stayed by his side through half a dozen diplomatic posts, until he returned to Moscow and moved into the inner circle of Russian intelligence.

But a life like Finlay Finlay’s leaves in its wake tiny clues that sooner or later come to the attention of counter-intelligence. Finlay understood that danger, and one afternoon in his summer dacha outside Moscow he reviewed his career and came to the inescapable conclusion that, pretty soon, all those fragments would hit critical mass. Once they did, it would be vyshaya mera to him too.

He arranged to visit family just outside St Petersburg and went sailing in a little one-hander dinghy on a beautiful summer Sunday. Then he put a waterproof pack with his clothes in around his waist, slipped overboard and swam ashore in Finland. The distance wasn’t far, but it was no small achievement given his size.

He made his way to the US Embassy, declared himself to the shocked duty officer and fell into the warm embrace of his CIA handlers. After being debriefed, he reviewed his bank accounts and realized that, between his retainer and the bonuses he had received for every piece of high-level intelligence he had delivered, he was an affluent man. The agency gave him a new identity, settled him in Arizona, kept watch on him and then, satisfied that he had adapted to his new life, let him slip from their consciousness.

The one thing that nobody could have anticipated, however, was that Russia would descend into the hands of outlaws masquerading as politicians. Fortunes were being made as the country’s assets were sold off to those with the right connections, many of whom were former KGB operatives. Finlay watched it from his home in Scottsdale – nothing too elaborate, a nice three-bedder – and became increasingly frustrated. He liked the money, our friend Finlay.

He had been around the secret world long enough to have hidden away a safety-deposit box with several alternative identities and to know the value of what he still had in his head. He drove to Chula Vista, south of San Diego, one morning and walked through the turnstiles at the crossing into Mexico. According to the fake passport he was carrying, he was a Canadian with US residency. Travelling under the assumed name, he flew to Europe, made contact with his former buddies in Moscow and met them in a café at Zurich airport.

Finlay, or whatever name he was using at that stage, gave them a taste – a gourmet sampler, if you will – of everything he knew about the personnel and double agents employed by his former best friends in McLean, Virginia. It was so good that the Russians booked themselves in for the full dinner and another spy had come in from the cold.

Finlay was no fool – he held back the best of his material, dealing it out sparingly, all the time manoeuvring himself closer to those with the right connections. By the time he’d wound himself in tight, he was able to swap his best secrets for a gas-exploration licence here, an industrial complex at a knock-down price there.

When the CIA finally realized that one of its former assets was selling them out and called The Division in, Finlay was a wealthy man with a mansion behind twenty-foot walls in Barvikha, Moscow’s most desirable suburb and, while he wasn’t as rich as some of his neighbours, he was wealthy enough to have also purchased a luxury penthouse in Monaco.

He had changed his name half a dozen times and altered his appearance, thanks to an excellent plastic surgeon, but the rat-catchers at The Division tracked him down. We could have killed him in Moscow or Monaco – you could kill a man anywhere – but the real measure of a successful execution wasn’t in the obituary but in the escape. Moscow presented the problem of getting in and out of the country, and the less than square mile which constituted the principality of Monaco – with over four thousand CCTV cameras – was the most closely monitored postage stamp on earth.

Finlay’s penthouse, however, did offer us one advantage. Its picture windows and the French doors opening on to a terrace gave us the opportunity, by using a special microphone, to eavesdrop on what was said inside. The system wasn’t perfect, it missed a lot, but one of the fragments it captured concerned a boat. We knew he didn’t own one, so a quick scout around the marina, where all the luxury cruisers were moored, soon turned up the fact that Finlay and a small party were travelling to what was almost certainly the strangest party on earth.

Every year, for six hours before the tide changed, it was held in Bodrum.