The famous Artist was now in his nineties and living quietly in a country house, far from public life. Former colleagues unwisely approached him for advice, and the old cleaner made a surprising decision: he would help Anne. He had genuine contempt both for the London tycoon and for the polished new managers now running his old institution.
He believed that only this woman might present the story not as crude propaganda but as the full, unsettling drama it really was. Through intermediaries, The Artist anonymously sent Anne classified copies of reports on the punitive operation, stripped of names and official markings. The papers contained chilling details: the boxer’s broken arms, the intellectual’s induced collapse, and more.
The package even included an audio recording of the interrogation in which one of the young men, sniveling and terrified, hurried to betray his friends. The anonymous note urged her to publish the material alongside the diary so the world would see both the crime and the punishment in all their scale. Armed with that evidence, Anne had little trouble persuading the Swiss heirs to hand over the artifact without payment in the name of historical truth.
She signed with an independent Paris publisher and began work on a sensational book about the events of that autumn. News that the reports had leaked into the hands of an independent investigator caused panic on both sides of the political divide. Officials in Moscow and anti-government émigrés in London alike realized they were losing control of an explosive story.
The whole affair threatened to blow up in a way that could bury everyone involved. The furious oligarch understood that his neat plan to quickly discredit the Russian state had failed. If the reports of the revenge operation were published, some Western readers might feel an uncomfortable sympathy for the brutal efficiency of the state’s response.
The image of merciless retribution was too compelling, and so he ordered his people to silence or frighten the writer at any cost. Back in the capital, the intelligence leadership was no less rattled, unsure how extensive the archival leak really was. They launched a hard internal investigation, desperately trying to identify the source.
Investigators searched for a traitor, but no one thought to suspect a retired veteran long since written off as ancient history. The services feared the book would prove both their effectiveness and their lawlessness at the same time. That, in turn, threatened to damage the country’s carefully cultivated image as a modern state governed by law…
