Finn was sitting at the head of the table in a private meeting room at the Baltschug, in his role of Second Secretary of Trade and Investment. He was holding court with a dozen or so business and security acolytes and their boss Pavel Drachevsky, the billionaire aluminium tycoon. Drachevsky had invited some of his managers: his leaden ex-KGB security boss Chimkov; Alexander, the poet, translator and KGB snake who had worked at the United Nations in Geneva for several years; and my friend Natasha, who tried to act in Russia’s confused public relations world as Drachevsky’s PR assistant.

Whether Finn knew the lunch was a set-up or not, he didn’t show it. When I arrived, deliberately late, he looked completely relaxed. He was sitting in a high-backed chair at the head of the long table. He wore a slightly creased blue suit and a tie, which could have been tied by a schoolboy, with a large thick knot and one very short end. He had brown hair, brushed straight back over his head and greying slightly at the temples, and his face was lined from laughter. His eyes, which changed through various shades of green and brown, depending on the light, as I discovered later, contained a kind of merry amusement that stopped just short of scorn. Finn always seemed to be enjoying himself.

I noticed that he addressed more of his conversation to Natasha, who is very pretty, than to Drachevsky, who was the reason Finn was there and who can’t claim good looks as his forte.

Whether or not Finn knew who I was, I couldn’t tell, but as I entered the room dressed in black leather–it embarrasses me now to recall this–I immediately had his attention. Of course I did. That was the idea. Finn’s reputation for womanising in Moscow was always considered to be the hook to catch him with, despite our consistent failures up till now, and in the crude logic of the KGB it was considered that Finn would be more of a pushover if I, the youngest female KGB colonel, wore black leather.