Читать книгу December - James Steel, James Steel - Страница 6

THURSDAY 4 DECEMBER

Alex stumbled on an icy patch in the dark and cursed. He steadied himself and moved on more carefully. Getting around London now was like going for a walk in the countryside at night: there were no streetlights at all and he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.

The road was silent and knee-deep in snow; the stuff was falling slowly but heavily, his footsteps were muffled and he felt a soft resistance to each stride. A thick layer of snow had accreted on every horizontal surface, no matter how small: the tops of car wing mirrors parked along the street; between the uprights of the black metal railings screening the houses from the road.

He had met Harrington two days before and was now making his way from his house up the New King’s Road to The Boltons in South Kensington—the exclusive street where he had been instructed to meet the oligarch. He hadn’t even been given the man’s name yet. Apparently he had just flown in from Moscow and was hosting a party, although Alex wasn’t sure how the hell he was going to do that in the present circumstances: there was no power, and food stocks were beginning to run low.

Harrington had read out the invitation with a pained expression: ‘It’s to celebrate the Fixed Great Feast of the Russian Orthodox Church: Entry into the Temple of our Most Holy Lady Mother of God and Ever-Virgin Mary.’

He had then barked in irritation: ‘Look, just turn up and introduce yourself as Alexander Grekov. Our contact will take it from there. I will sort the transfer of the money and I’ll look into that other thing…’ He waved his hand in disgust at Alex’s demand for a VC. ‘Just pull this off and frankly you can ask for the bloody world. As far as you’re concerned, though, this is your last contact with HMG. From now on we don’t know who you are and we don’t care if you get into any shit when you’re on the op. You are totally deniable. You’re on your own, Devereux!’ he had added with relish.

Alex stopped to check his location with his torch. He shone the beam along a wall looking for a street name; familiar places suddenly became alien when they were plunged into pitch-darkness. The few passers-by he did meet seemed threatening and they huddled away from each other. He found a name and then brushed the snowflakes off the torch, stuck it back in his overcoat pocket, and walked on.

He was always struck by the huge scale of the houses in The Boltons neighbourhood: five floors plus basement. ‘House’ was an understatement; they were really white stucco palaces. Some of them had candlelight shining dimly from their windows but most were just black looming hulks.

Despite the ill-tempered meeting with Harrington, Alex was actually feeling a sense of excitement. He was committed to the operation now. The chance to serve his country again was irresistible once his anger against Harrington had died down and he was also galvanised by the huge sum of money that he stood to earn. This could be the restoration of the Devereux family’s fortunes that he had always dreamed of. Plans of how he could repair Akerly had already begun to circle in his mind.

He wasn’t sure what to expect at the party. A Fixed Great Feast of the Russian Orthodox Church didn’t sound like a bundle of laughs.

He was nearing the address now and thought he could hear a faint sound against the backdrop of the silent city. He walked cautiously on and detected a muffled beat coming through the night; there was also a faint glow from round the corner up ahead.

As he rounded it he saw a huge house lit up with strings of white fairy lights twisted around the bare branches of a pair of old beech trees, spreading a canopy of twirling lights over the driveway. A large mobile generator unit hummed under one of them. The place was lit up like a cruise liner gliding through a dark sea. Arc lights on the walls poured out a wasteful excess of light—almost obscene in the midst of all the darkness.

On the road outside stretched a line of cars with chauffeurs: huge, long-bonneted Rolls-Royces, Range Rovers and pumped-up 4x4s. A line of chattering guests filed up to the double gates of the drive; they looked like Eurotrash: twentysomethings in expensively ripped jeans and blazers, and middle-aged businessmen in casual suits with trophy wives all wrapped up in expensive furs.

Alex walked up and stood awkwardly in line. He had been preparing to talk small-scale military operations rather than small talk. The house gates were open but blocked by two huge security men in black bomber jackets and a very attractive tall, slim girl from somewhere he couldn’t place in central Asia—Mongolia? She wore high-heeled black boots and a long sable coat with a cowl-like hood. Standing in front of the two doormen, she was welcoming guests and checking them off on a clipboard.

She flashed a dazzling, friendly smile as Alex stepped forward, and said cheerfully: ‘Dobry vecher!’

Alex quickly replied: ‘Dobry deetche.’

‘Kak vasha familia?’ she continued, holding the pen poised over her clipboard.

‘Maya familia Grekov.’

‘Ah, Alexander!’ She seemed to be expecting him and smiled as if she had found a long-lost friend, then ticked his name off.

She continued in Russian:‘Welcome to Sergey Shaposhnikov’s house. My name is Bayarmaa.’ She held out a delicate gloved hand. ‘Please, follow me.’ She handed the clipboard to one of the bouncers and led the way up the drive with a swirl of her long coat.

Shaposhnikov.

So that was who it was, thought Alex as he followed her. Sergey Shaposhnikov—he knew the name but couldn’t think in what context he had come across it.

He followed Bayarmaa up the large front steps flanked by white columns and in through the open double doors. Heaters blew a curtain of warmth over them. There seemed to be no shortage of power here and the excess of heat felt luxurious after so many days of shivering.

The heat was just as well, thought Alex, as he was confronted by the sight of a scantily clad pole-dancer writhing on a platform as they walked into the hall ahead of the huge room that took up most of the raised ground floor of the house.

The Entry of the Ever-Virgin Mary, he thought wryly to himself as they walked past. Clearly Shaposhnikov didn’t take his orthodoxy that seriously.

They handed their coats to a smartly dressed woman by the door and then a waitress with a tray of vodka shot glasses walked up to them. Bayarmaa handed Alex one with a smile that brooked no refusal. He nodded his thanks, threw the drink back and followed her through, savouring the burst of warmth in his stomach.

Beyond the pole-dancer, the high-ceilinged room was noisy and packed with a couple of hundred guests. A bar stretched all the way down one side with ten uniformed barmen running around frantically trying to supply the crowd of people.

A band at the far end of the room were enthusiastically belting out a Russian cover of a Stones song. After a few bars Alex worked it out as ‘Brown Sugar’.

They looked an odd group, dressed in nylon imitation Russian peasant garb and fronted by a plump fifty-year-old woman with peroxide-blonde hair and heavy framed glasses in a long pink medieval robe and traditional Russian headdress. Behind her stood a tall, lugubrious-looking, bearded man in a green smock, tasselled cord belt, baggy Cossack pants and boots. He was playing bass on an enormous balalaika. The guests were too busy drinking and talking to listen to the band, though. No one was dancing yet.

Alex followed Bayarmaa’s silky black hair as they pushed their way through the crowd to the bar.

A loud squawk of alarm came from the lead singer on the stage and the music crashed to a halt mid-song. Looking out over the press of heads Alex could see that a drunken businessman had clambered on stage and grabbed the microphone from her. Everyone turned to the stage and a chorus of angry shouts and boos broke out. The man with the microphone began shouting back at them in Russian: ‘Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!’

He was middle-aged, a bit above average height and well built, with a mop of straw-blond hair that shone in the stage lights and hung down over his eyes. He was wearing a crumpled suit and tie and had a large diamond stud that glittered in one ear. He stood at the front of the stage swaying and pointing at the crowd.

‘You want to party, eh? I’ll show you how to party! I am the Party Commissar!’ He said this in English to get the double meaning and burst into a high-pitched giggle at his own joke. ‘Yes, you’re all miserable Russian fuckers! Your heads are full of dark forests with wolves running around in them and the Party Commissar has detected these anti-revolutionary sentiments, which have led to erroneous political judgements. You’re not dancing!’

The crowd seemed to know that the man was just a good-natured buffoon and began laughing at his parody of Soviet political rhetoric.

‘So as a good agent of the workers’ state I will take all steps necessary to ensure the re-education of the proletariat. Unless you become party-Stakhanovites, I will have you all shot! I want over-fulfilment of your party quotas!’

The crowd had caught on and cheered loudly now.

Bayarmaa nudged Alex and said, her eyes sparkling with adoration, ‘That’s Sergey.’

Alex frowned. He was not at all what Alex had expected.

Sergey lurched round to look at the lead singer, who had recovered her composure.

‘Lyuda, come on, enough of this Western shit. Let’s have some proper dancing!’

The band hastily rearranged themselves and the lead balalaika player stepped forward.

Sergey spotted some friends in the audience. ‘Grigory! Katya! Vera! Come on!’ He jumped down into the crowd, who made a ring, whilst the four formed themselves into a quadrille and, when the music started, began a fast Russian dance. Sergey grinned and clapped along as the men waited for the women to complete their delicate shimmying moves—hands on hips and heads thrown back with narrowed eyes and pouting mouths.

However, when it came to Sergey’s turn for a solo, his expression became deadly serious as he threw himself into the jumps and kicks—now squatting down, now springing up and whirling round.

The crowd roared in appreciation at his bravado and even more when his partner, Grigory, fell over. The dance ended with a storm of applause and much back-slapping.

Sergey blundered away through the crowd, saw Bayarmaa next to the bar and headed towards them.

‘Hey, my little Artic fox!’

He embraced her with a huge bear hug, swinging her off her feet and around. She squealed with delight before kissing him on the lips when he dumped her back down again.

She collected herself and remembered Alex, standing next to her.

‘Sergey, this is Mr Grekov.’ She rested a light hand on Alex’s arm and drew him towards Sergey.

‘Eh? Grekov?’

Sergey looked confused and leered at him from under his shock of hair, now slicked flat over his ears with sweat. He had a broad-boned face with fleshy lips and pale skin. Laughter lines creased the corners of his eyes, which had a slight Slavic slant to them. The chaotic hair, rumpled suit and diamond earring gave him a piratical air.

‘Yes, the geologist you said you wanted to talk to,’ she prompted him.

‘Ahh!’ he slurred in recognition and stuck his hand out towards Alex. It was wet with sweat.

A man barged through the crowd and threw an arm around Sergey. He looked like an old-style Mafia don: in his fifties, black-suited and heavily built with steel-grey hair brushed straight back.

‘Hey, you crazy fuck—“Party Commissar!”’ he laughed at the joke again. Ignoring Alex, Sergey turned to the man, became animated again and roared along with him in an eager-to-please way.

‘Vladimir Ilarionovich,’ he said, using his patronymic as a sign of respect, and then saw that he had an empty glass, ‘you’ve run out of magic party liquid! I’ll send you to the camps for that!’

The man wheezed with laughter: ‘Yes! Ten years with no rights of correspondence!’ he said, repeating the euphemistic death sentence handed out in the 1930s purges.

Sergey giggled manically and mimed shooting someone in the head: ‘That’s right! Shoot the bastards!’

He turned to the bar. ‘Hey, Ivan!’ he shouted at the nearest barman. ‘Three Litvinenkos!’ He put a hot sweaty arm around both Alex and Vladimir and bent them over the bar.

‘This is my favourite cocktail, in memory of that bastard.’

Vladimir nodded grimly. ‘Yes—we fucked him up good and proper.’

Ivan the barman grinned as he lined up three highball glasses and poured lavish quantities of the ingredients, snapping off the stream of liquor with a flick of his wrists.

Sergey listed them as they went in: ‘Vodka, crème de menthe, apple schnapps, melon liquor, a squirt of lemonade and then the final ingredient—not Polonium-210.’ He winked at Vladimir as Ivan pulled a packet of Alka-Seltzer out of his barman’s apron and clunked two into each glass so that the bright green contents fizzed radioactively.

Sergey picked up his glass and clinked with the other two. ‘See you under the table!’

Vladimir laughed and shook his head in admiration. ‘Sergey Stepanovich…’

Sergey smiled affectionately back and then threw his arm round Alex and said to Vladimir, ‘Right, I’ve got to talk to this boring geologist. You can fuck off and find yourself something to do.’ He pointed at the pole-dancer.

Vladimir looked at Alex and grunted, ‘Geology, huh!’ and then looked at the dancer and grinned at Sergey. ‘I prefer biology…’ he grinned, and lurched off through the crowd towards her twisting figure.

Sergey grabbed Bayarmaa around the waist and steered her out of the room. ‘Come on, let’s go to my office,’ he said over his shoulder to Alex, who followed, clutching his foaming, green drink.

By now he was seriously disturbed by what he had seen of Sergey. This is the man in charge of organising the most dangerous political coup ever? he thought as they threaded through the guests in the huge ground-floor room and made their way up the sweeping main staircase.

Alex had finally remembered where he had heard Sergey’s name before—on the gossip page of The Times. There had been a paparazzi photo of him leaving a club late at night with some starlet. He couldn’t remember what the salacious element of the story was but it didn’t surprise him in the least after what he had just seen. The operation was risky enough without having a lunatic in charge of it.

They came to the top of the broad staircase where another pole-dancer was flexing herself in a large open room. A group of businessmen was gathered around her, admiring the show. The atmosphere was calmer here: music played but guests were chatting, and canapés and champagne were circulated by yet more uniformed staff.

Set in an alcove on one side of the room were a large pair of polished wooden double doors. In front of it a small crowd of people was standing around with drinks, talking and evidently waiting for someone. Blocking them from the door was a large man in a dark suit with buzz-cut hair and an earpiece. His hands were clasped firmly in front of him and his eyes scanned the guests in a mechanical way.

Sergey detached himself from Bayarmaa and suddenly switched to hyperactive.

‘Friends, friends, friends! Yes!’ he shouted and then ran around the group embracing men and women alike, kissing everyone three times on the cheeks and making manic small talk with each of them.

‘Yes! Yegor! Ah-ha! The new pipeline, great flow rates! Well done! Yes! I love it!…Tatyana! Ah! I love the new store! Yes! We need to talk about the manager on the second floor, though; she’s got to go!…Misha! Great! We’ll speak about Production Line Two. I have a new idea! Maybe we’ll actually make some money out of it, heh?…OK, please, talk, drink—I’ll see you all in good time!’

Sergey gestured to Alex to take a seat on a large divan covered in oriental rugs along the wall opposite. He then pushed open the door to his inner sanctum and waved two men inside: one was Grigory, whom he had been dancing with—arty-looking with curly black hair and a crumpled Armani suit—and the other a pallid man in a formal dark suit and tie, whose eyes glittered quietly as he glanced round and slipped in through the open door.

Bayarmaa took up what seemed to be her usual position as charming hostess at the door, chatting to Sergey’s employees. Alex sat down, feeling annoyed at the chaotic way things were being handled. He took a slug of his strange drink—it was actually not bad. He sat back and quietly people-watched as guests came and went up and down the stairs.

After ten minutes, one panelled door opened and Grigory and the pale man came out, looking tense. They muttered goodbyes to Bayarmaa and walked off with their heads down. She turned to Alex and motioned him to come over.

He stood up and made to move towards her when something cut into the corner of his eye. His head flicked round.

The woman was tall with a lean silhouette mainly composed of long blonde hair, cheekbone and leg. She wore designer jeans, heels, and a white shirt with a high collar and large cuffs, sculpted to emphasise her generous cleavage—all very simple, very elegant, very impactful.

Despite all that was on his mind, Alex felt a systemic shock go through him. It wasn’t just her figure, it was also the way she walked: head back, looking neither to left nor right. She was in her twenties but had the presence of a grande dame.

She moved from the top of the stairs and past the crowd admiring the semi-naked dancer in a few long strides; cutting through the sleazy atmosphere with the cold indifference of a Soviet icebreaker.

The woman fired a look like a bullet at Bayarmaa, who curled her lip in return but stepped back from the door. The guard also withdrew deferentially and the woman pushed open both doors at once, marched purposefully into the room and slammed them behind her. Alex sat back down, feeling a slight tremor from watching the episode.

It was five minutes before both doors were again wrenched open and she strode out. Sergey hurried after her: eyes wild, hair astray and hands outstretched imploringly. He put a hand on her elbow to stop her, but in one fluid movement she spun round and hit him hard with the back of her hand on his shoulder. He deflated instantly, ducking his head and hunching his shoulders. From this defensive posture he looked up at her with humble affection; his hands held meekly open in front of him as he mumbled some explanation. The woman listened to him with hands on her hips, mouth set firm, her gaze level and eerily calm.

Sergey finished speaking and looked at her imploringly. She held his gaze for a long moment, neither assenting nor dissenting, before turning her head away. He fumbled in his suit pocket, pulled out a small jewelled box and pressed it into the palm of her hand. She glanced at it wearily, sighed, and tucked it into a little handbag hooked over one shoulder before walked away from him.

As she moved past Alex, her head turned towards him and they looked at each other for a split second. The woman strode on and made her way down the stairs.

She walked out of the gate in her long fur coat and stepped into the back of one of Sergey’s chauffeur-driven, black Range Rovers with tinted windows. As the driver moved off, she pulled the ornate box out of her handbag and turned it over in her hand, thoughtfully examining the gold whorls and the precious stones set into it.

After looking at it for a while she flipped the clasp open with her thumbnail and took out the single folded sheet of plain, white paper. On it were two lines of Sergey’s appalling scratchy handwriting: cramped, unevenly spaced and with occasional spikes up and down.

She recognised the verse. It was Pushkin:

Past sorrow to me is like wine

Stronger with every passing year.

The woman closed her eyes for a moment in a look of pain. She folded the note, put it back in the box and looked out at the dark city sliding past.

Sergey suddenly switched on his normal, manic persona and threw his arms open towards Alex: ‘Ah-ha! Grekov!’ He gestured into his office.

Alex put his drink down and stalked through the open door, his dark brows knit in a frown of disapproval. He was not impressed by what he had seen of Sergey so far.

The room was a long rectangle, dimly lit with a large boardroom table down the middle and elegantly curtained windows along the left-hand side. On the opposite wall and between the windows were enormous bookshelves running up to the high ceiling. Alex glanced at the titles—both Russian and Western, mainly literature but also poetry, art, science and technical manuals, architecture and travel.

Sergey seemed oblivious to Alex’s glowering and rushed ahead, flamboyantly waving him past the table—‘No, no, no!’—to a large oriental day bed set on top of a waist-high brick platform, in the Central Asian style, against the far end of the room. The bed was covered in expensive oriental carpets and pillows and surrounded by a low rail.

Portraits of various tsars, along with Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Tolstoy, and other bearded Russians that Alex didn’t recognise, hung on the wall above the day bed.

Alex perched awkwardly on the edge of one side of it, whilst Sergey busied himself opening a cast-iron door to a stove built into the brick base and chucking a couple of logs into it from a wicker basket. He slid onto the opposite side of the platform from Alex, stretching his legs out and chuckling, ‘I always like to warm up my butt a bit.’

The platform was covered in a clutter of books, newspapers, laptops and DVDs. Sergey wriggled his backside and then fidgeted and pulled a DVD out from under him. He looked at it and then showed the simple cartoon front cover to Alex. ‘Vinni Puh?’ he said quizzically.

Alex frowned. What the hell was he on about now?

‘Vinni Puh?’ Sergey said insistently. ‘Ah! No, you say, ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’? This is the Soviet version from 1971. Used to watch them as a kid—much better, much deeper, complete with existentialist angst. Check it out on YouTube—Vinni Puh Goes Visiting.’ He looked at the cover again, laughed and chucked it aside.

He ignored Alex’s stony silence and proceeded to make tea in a small ornate copper pot by alternately spooning in tea leaves and pouring hot water from a kettle with a long thin spout. He muttered from under the shaggy fringe of hair hanging over his face, ‘I like the Kalmyks’ style with bay leaves,’ and added some.

As he stirred the tea he looked up and said chirpily in English: ‘So you are enjoying my party?’

Alex looked at him, startled, his anger disarmed by Sergey’s sudden switch of language. He struggled to reply in a more civil manner in English than he had intended: ‘Yes…you’re the life and soul.’

Sergey stopped stirring the tea and stared at him. His smile cut out as if someone had switched off a light. He looked Alex gravely in the eye. ‘And do you know why I am the life and soul?’

Alex looked straight back, again caught out by his change of tone.

Sergey said very slowly, ‘Because in my soul I am alone.’

There was a long moment before he nodded, looked down at the pot and went back to stirring it and adding water.

The episode seemed to have brought a calmer mood on him. He started again in Russian: ‘So you are fucked off and wondering what you are doing at a party, sitting on a bed with a crazy Russian who wants to send you on a suicide mission to Siberia?’

Alex couldn’t have put it more succinctly himself so he just waited for Sergey to answer his own question.

‘Well, you are at a party because I always do my business at parties. I love business, I love parties.’ He held his hands out and smiled. ‘For me they are one and the same. It also means that I can see everyone without suspicion.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Well, all of us oligarchs are powerful so Comrade Krymov likes to keep us all under surveillance. But me,’ he gestured to himself, ‘I invite the bastards to my parties. You have just been drinking Litvinenkos with Colonel Vladimir Ilarionovich Gorsky, the station chief of the SVR in London.’

Alex narrowed his eyes and looked more intently at Sergey. The SVR was the foreign intelligence arm of the FSB—the Federal Security Service—the successor to the KGB.

‘We drink a lot of vodka together and he thinks he knows everything that goes on inside my head.’ Sergey shrugged. ‘He does know a lot of it but there are many rooms inside my head. So he tells me he thinks I am a clown who isn’t worth wasting any of his men on.’ Sergey nodded with satisfaction, seeming to take this as a compliment.

Alex began to unwind some of his early anger. Maybe Shaposhnikov wasn’t such an idiot as he had first appeared.

‘So Harrington says to me that we have you “by the short and curlies”.’ He pronounced the idiom with mock hesitancy and then grinned.

Alex replied curtly, ‘It wouldn’t be my first choice of operation.’ He decided the time had come to press for more reassurance on it. ‘I mean, what the hell chance does it have of succeeding? Krymov looks pretty well entrenched. He’s an unshakeable dictator.’

Sergey seemed to ignore the question, put the lid on the pot, poured a little tea into an engraved silver thimble cup and sipped it. He made a face, lifted the lid and poured the cupful back into the pot and then replied, ‘Hmm, well, from the outside, yes, but then nothing is as it seems in Russia. There are significant weaknesses in my country at both an élite and a popular level.’ He made a horizontal slicing action with one hand high up and then lower down to indicate where the problems lay in Russian society.

He was sounding like he might actually have a point. Alex was prepared to listen and leaned back against the rail on the bed.

Sergey warmed to his theme. ‘You see, Russia is not a state as you know it in the Western sense. The Soviets and then the Yeltsin anarchy undermined the rule of law. Everything was so inefficient and fucked up that people had to develop alternative currencies, and “informal practices”,’ he made speech marks with his finger, ‘to make it work. It’s what you call the favour system or patronage networks.’

He hurried on: ‘Look, there used to be two ideologies in the USSR—communism and criminalism. Now there is only one.’ He shrugged. ‘I mean, we used to have a Communist Party that could actually control the KGB but now there is no Communist Party so the secret police have no limits on their power.’ He paused to consider the irony and then smiled. ‘Only in Russia would you get rid of communism and then bring back the secret police to run the country.’

He continued carefully, emphasising his points with slow hand movements. ‘So the combination of all these things means that the country is controlled not by the normal institutions of a Western state, but by factional networks controlled by the siloviki.’ He looked enquiringly at Alex, who nodded in understanding—the bosses who ran the security services.

‘But the point for our little expedition is that there are many different security services: FSB, GRU—military intelligence, MVD—Interior Ministry, OMON—riot police. They all have their own troops. Then there’s the Spetsnaz—Special Forces—army, airforce, navy and marines. Each has its little networks of politicians and companies that it controls.

‘Putin removed the constitutional checks and balances on the executive, and once you’ve done that you’re back to the law of the jungle. I’m telling you, the factions in the Kremlin are like lions fighting over a kill. Putin and Medvedev divided power between themselves and then fell out, so Krymov was put in place supposedly because he was so boring that he wouldn’t threaten anyone. But he was more cunning than they thought, was able to rally a faction behind him and spring a coup against both of them.

‘So, we have gone back to a situation more like the court of a tsar, with competing factional groups of boyars—the nobles. The Tsar divided the assets of the country between them. That used to be land and serfs but now it’s political parties, government ministries, oil and gas resources, mines and companies. Because of this, the leader of Russia appears to outsiders as an autocrat but only because of the support of élite factions behind him. They support him because he suits their interests. As soon as they are not getting what they want, then they’ll turn on him.

‘You can get a stable political system if you have an intelligent guy like Putin who can actually balance factions, but Krymov is so stupid he can’t write two words without making five mistakes. So now we have a fight between the various branches of the security services for the spoils of the economy.’

Alex nodded; he could see what Sergey was saying and how it would open up conflict at an élite level.

‘OK, so who’s on your faction?’

Sergey grinned. ‘Well, officially I’m on no one’s. Krymov thinks he’s my best friend and,’ he made an equivocating gesture with his hand, ‘despite what I said, I like him. We’re drinking buddies and he laughs at my jokes, so he doesn’t take me seriously and just lets me drift around making money. I don’t harm anyone. I’m safely neutral, you see, plus I am a businessman—I started out on a market stall—so I can actually run businesses, which the siloviki can’t, so sometimes it’s helpful for them to put a strategic sector in neutral hands. That’s why I’ve got ownership of all the TV stations—it was easier to give them to a fool like me than start a huge fight between different groups.’

Alex saw a contradiction in Sergey’s motivation and looked at him quizzically. ‘But you’re making a lot of money out of all this?’

‘Yes, I am,’ Sergey nodded, unashamed.

‘So why are you starting a coup?’

‘Because Russia deserves better than this,’ he smiled, ‘Alexander…’ He frowned. ‘What’s your father’s name?’

Alex was momentarily wrong-footed. ‘Nicholas.’

Sergey started again in the correct respectful Russian manner. ‘Alexander Nikolayevich,’ he gave a self-deprecating smile and held up a hand, ‘all in good time. I will explain my motives later and you’ll meet our team tomorrow.’

He carried on along his former line of thought. ‘So, anyway, as I was saying, that’s the weakness at an élite level. On a popular level it’s the same. Russia looks strong but in fact things are not so good if you look under the surface. Our main problem is the curse of abundant natural resources: we’ve got so much oil and gas that we don’t have to go through the tiresome business of actually developing a functioning economy—we just dig a hole in the ground and the money pours out. Basically we’re just a petro-state in the same way as any other Third World dictatorship. It leads to what I call the gangsterisation of the economy. You have an FSB man sitting on the board of all major companies. Now these guys are good at wiretaps, surveillance, hits—they can do that—but can they read a balance sheet? Do they have a feel for a market? Can they organise a supply chain? The fuck they can! They’re hoods, spooks! And they have successfully screwed the economy as a result!’

Sergey grew more animated, jabbing his finger at Alex, his diamond earring flashing. ‘Do we have a thriving industrial sector? Do we export any manufactured goods at all apart from weapons? No! Do we have a service sector? No! Can you name one fucking Russian company that isn’t Gazprom, Lukoil or some other natural resources producer? A software company? A clothing brand? No! Because we are a fucking banana republic run by goons! Do I want that for my country? The fuck I do!’

Sergey was suddenly disturbed by how carried away he had got, and poured out two small teas to calm himself down. He did this with a thin stream of liquid from a height above the cups, and then neatly snapped off the stream with a flick of his wrist. He put the ornate pot down and continued.

‘So, we are what you call a one-trick pony. Over half of all government revenue comes from oil taxes but they make money only when the price is over seventy bucks a barrel. When prices hit one forty-seven we were laughing, but now they’ve crashed we’re screwed. We didn’t share out the proceeds of the wealth when we did have it, so bastards like me are rich, but if you look at the provinces and the working class, they are desperately poor. I mean, the population is actually shrinking by seven hundred thousand people a year because of alcoholism, suicide, drugs and AIDS. We’ll lose a third of our population in the next fifty years. That’s not a healthy country! And those stupid fucking sheep signed all their freedoms away in the good times!’

Alex frowned, unsure whom Sergey was talking about.

‘I mean the Russian people. Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of them, but Russians have never had much respect for democracy. They call it shit-ocracy!’

Alex recognised the Russian pun on the words demokratia and dermokratia.

‘So, they effectively signed a non-participation pact with the government that said: “You let us enjoy the material benefits of the oil price boom, and we’ll turn a blind eye to whatever political violence you want to use.” It’s exactly like that thing about “When they came for the Jews, I did not protest because I was not a Jew”, blah-blah-blah.’ Sergey waved a hand to indicate the rest. ‘So now that times are hard, there’s no one left to protest for them.

‘Now Krymov has spent all the Stabilisation Fund on rearmament so we have twenty per cent inflation—that has really pissed a lot of ordinary people off!’

Sergey was nearing the end of his tea ceremony now, adding salt in little dashes to the cups. He stopped to jab the tiny spoon at Alex.

‘And the final issue that will help our operation the most is the way that they have driven out foreign companies. Those are the guys that actually do know how to run a factory, a refinery, whatever.’

He grinned lopsidedly. ‘Have you heard my joke about foreign investment in Russia?’

Alex shook his head.

Sergey smiled. ‘Well, at the beginning of the process the foreigners have all the money and the experience and the Russians have nothing.’ He paused and looked at Alex with a twinkle in his eye. ‘But by the end of the process the Russians have all the money and the foreigners have had an experience.’

Alex couldn’t help grinning as Sergey bobbed his head about happily.

‘It’s good, yeah? So the siloviki get greedy and drive out ExxonMobil, Total, BP—all of them—so now there is no one left to run the oil refineries and we can’t even produce enough petrol for ourselves, in the largest oil-producing country on Earth!’ He was laughing now. ‘I mean, it would be funny but…’

‘You know, the same thing happened in Iran. We both had to introduce petrol rationing. Krymov used the OMON to suppress the riots when it was introduced but, believe me, with rationing and inflation, there are a lot of fucked-off ordinary people out there who want to see Krymov dead.’

He finished making the tea and put the spoon down.

‘So, comrade, in answer to your question—do we have a chance of overthrowing Krymov? It will be tough, but yes, we do.’

He picked up a small cup of tea and stretched out his arm to give it to Alex.

Alex looked at him warily, thinking over what he had said and calculating the odds in his head. It tallied with what he had read in the papers and with what Harrington had said in his briefing.

He reached out, took the cup from Sergey and sipped the bitter tea.

Sergey smiled and drank.

‘OK, good—you passed the interview.’ He paused. ‘So now you are Director of GeoScan.’

Alex frowned. What was the Russian on about now? His mind seemed to hop about everywhere.

‘It’s a UK-based international geo-survey firm. I have the details of your next survey mission.’

He jumped off the bed, took a large portrait of Karl Marx off the wall, opened a money safe behind it and pulled a black leather document wallet out. He passed Alex the bulky folder and sat on the bed again.

Alex put his tea down and took it hesitantly.

‘Go on, have a look,’ Sergey urged him. ‘There’s a lot of uranium ore in Chita province in Siberia and I want you to find the highest grade deposits.’

He reached over, pulled a map of Russia out of the wallet and spread it on the carpet between them. Alex quickly ran his eyes back and forth over it. He was amazed, looking at the Mercator projection map, how big the country was. The whole enormous mass of European Russia all the way east to Moscow only made up a tiny proportion of it.

Sergey pointed to a large highlighted area in the far east, three thousand miles from Moscow, near Lake Baikal and just north of the border where Mongolia and China met.

‘Chita is the province in Siberia that I’m governor of—it’s next to Abramovich’s patch—and it’s where Raskolnikov is in prison. Your cover for getting you and a team in there will be as geologists doing a survey. That’ll also be a good excuse for you to have access to my mining company helicopters because it’s a huge area to cover—four hundred and thirty-one thousand square kilometres.’ He laughed self-indulgently. ‘That’s twice the size of the whole United Kingdom, and I am the sole, unelected ruler of it all—isn’t that great!’ He giggled at the thought.

‘Total population is about one million, mainly Russians and Buryats—they’re a Mongol tribe. Like Bayarmaa—she’s gorgeous, yes? God, those cheekbones!’

He clapped his hands, looked dazed for a moment, and then suddenly switched into a focused mode, pulling sheets out of the folder, poring over them and pointing things out.

‘This is the map of Krasnokamensk, the town near where Raskolnikov is in the prison labour camp. You will be able to base your team here.’ He indicated an area on the edge of town. ‘It’s the transport depot for my mining company and will be a secure base for your operations. I have a Mil Mi-17 helicopter there in a hangar for you to use and a hostel for your men.’

Alex nodded. ‘I know the Mil Mi-17 from my African operations.’ It was a very popular, robust aircraft used all around the world.

Sergey nodded but wagged his finger at him. ‘Hmm, but remember this isn’t Africa. It’s minus thirty out there at the moment.’

He pulled out more sheets. ‘These are the plans of the camp, and as much detail on the guards and defences as I can get. I got them because I run the company that supplies the camp with food, but the prison itself is run by the MVD—that’s the Interior Ministry—and they are definitely not on our side.’ He raised his eyebrows warningly.

‘OK, that is enough for you to start getting an initial plan together. I am giving you just twenty-four hours to do it because I know you’re good,’ he grinned encouragingly, ‘and because I have a contact in the camp who gets messages out to me and I know that the bastards are planning to kill Raskolnikov soon, so we need to get going.’

‘Why don’t they just kill him straight out?’

Sergey screwed up his face. ‘He’s like a saint in my country. He’s too popular for them to just go out and shoot him. There would have to be a state funeral and it really wouldn’t do for his body to be on display with a big bullet hole in his head. No, it’s a lot easier for them to just trump up some tax charges, lock him up for years and let his memory fade, and then bump him off in an accident.

‘We’ll meet back here with the other members of my team at eight o’clock tomorrow evening. OK?’

He smiled at Alex as if it was the simplest thing in the world.