December. James Steel

whatever the reason, we find ourselves dealing with a very aggressive operator who,’ Harrington began ticking points off on his fingers, ‘cuts off gas supplies to Ukraine when they get the NATO Membership Action Plan, starts harassing joint-venture oil companies until they all pull out, renews nuclear bomber flights into our airspace and ramps up arms spending from $35 billion to over $100 billion a year using up all his remaining Stabilisation Fund. He also starts moving troops up through Belarus to the Polish border over the missile shield, and finally we have the bombing raids on Georgia!

      ‘Now, to put all this in context, you have to remember that Russians have a major persecution complex, so initially we thought that this was all just the usual manufactured hysterics, talking tough, playing to the domestic gallery and throwing his weight around to make the country feel good about itself.

      ‘However, we now have good reason to think that Krymov actually believes his own propaganda. He genuinely thinks that the West is involved in a secret plot to undermine Russia,’ he paused to consider the irony of his next point, ‘so that has now become a reality.’

      Alex’s eyes narrowed. Harrington blinked self-consciously, disturbed by hearing himself actually admit the purpose of the meeting.

      ‘Let me show you what I mean.’ He twisted the laptop round so that Alex could see the screen. ‘This footage was shot a couple of months ago by a journalist we have connections with. He was on a tour with Krymov in the town of Tver in the provinces. It was a sort of “meet the people” exercise. Krymov is a secretive, remote figure and some media adviser told him he needed to get out more and get some footage with the man in the street. So the local boss set up a tour of a street market with just a few hand-picked journalists covering it. That’s why this footage hasn’t ever been seen in public—if we revealed it they would guess our source and he’d be a goner. Anyway, see what you think.’

      He peered at the laptop and tapped at the keys awkwardly.

      An image flicked up on the screen, shot in daylight with a shoulder-held camera; it jostled about above the crowd but the scene was clear. In front of it was the familiar profile of Krymov, a nondescript, short man with a podgy grey face and glasses, wearing a fur hat and overcoat. He could have been a bank clerk but for the crowd of tall security agents and policemen in a protective ring around him. At the edge of the shot Alex caught glimpses of a daytime street market: red plastic buckets and cheap toys hung off the top frame of a market stall. It was snowing lightly and people’s breath clouded around them.

      The crowd moved down between the lines of stalls, and shoppers looked up nervously as the presidential entourage approached them. The camera managed to push slightly ahead of Krymov so that you could see he had a fixed smile on his face, as if he had been told to look friendly by his aides but wasn’t sure how. A blonde PR lady in a white, fur-trimmed parka went in front, grabbed a woman shopper and dragged her over to meet him.

      There was an awkward greeting with the terrified woman bowing her head in deference, not daring to look at Krymov, who continued looking around him, smiling inanely. The PR lady then stepped in and hosted an embarrassingly stilted exchange of questions: ‘Tell the President how good your life is in Tver.’ English subtitles had been added but Alex could follow the Russian without them. He had learned it on an army course, in search of an intellectual challenge to make up for the fact that he hadn’t gone to university.

      As the woman was mumbling about being very grateful for her government flat, Krymov paid no attention to her at all but continued to beam around him with a lack of engagement that was painful to watch. In the course of this an old man suddenly appeared at the woman’s side and stared at Krymov. He was unshaven, gap-toothed, wearing a tattered old overcoat and carrying a walking stick. The PR lady looked at him in disgust.

      ‘Ah! It’s you!’ he blurted out in a wheezy voice, jabbing a finger at Krymov. ‘Yes, it’s about time you came up here to answer some questions! Where’s my pension?’

      He waved his walking stick at the President and started shouting, ‘We don’t care what’s happening in Moscow, give us our pensions! And what about all the corruption? Those sons of bitches in the town hall, they…’

      Throughout the tirade Krymov’s entourage stood paralysed with shock. It had the opposite effect on Krymov, though. From being frozen in the pose of a grinning idiot, he was suddenly galvanised into action by the presence of an enemy.

      The false smile vanished and his face flamed red with anger. He jabbed a finger back at the man. ‘Look here, Granddad! Fuck yer mother, you son of a bitch!’ He yanked the old man’s wooden stick from his hand. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about! I’m the master here! Do you get it? I’m the master here!’

      Holding the stick halfway along the shaft, he struck the old man across the bridge of his nose. He threw his hands up in defence but Krymov began beating him over the head and then grabbed his hair and struck him repeatedly across the face with the handle of the stick. Blood spattered over both of them as they continued to tussle.

      The President’s minders finally sprang out of their paralysis and dragged the man away from Krymov, who was now shouting at them: ‘We’ve been infiltrated! He’s a foreign saboteur! Shoot that son of a bitch! Shoot him!’

      A large hand reached up towards the camera lens and covered it. The screen went black and the film cut off.

      Alex sat back in his chair. He shook his head in disbelief, shocked to see a major world statesman behave in such a savage way. He now saw Krymov as completely off the scale of normal behaviour, in the same way he thought about Idi Amin or Hitler.

      ‘He’s lost it,’ he muttered.

      He realised that the country had a major problem on its hands and it wasn’t something he could easily stand by and allow to continue. The Devereux family had been loyal servants of the Crown since Guy d’Evereux had fought for the Conqueror at Hastings. Alex’s school, Wellington, had continued to drill the service ethic into him and there had been a family member in the Household Division every year since Waterloo until Alex had left it.

      Despite his grievances against his regiment for passing him over for promotion, Alex still had much of this patriotic, patrician attitude; a sense of duty to the nation was woven into his being. Harrington had clearly been counting on that, he realised.

      The general nodded now in rueful agreement with Alex’s comment.

      ‘Hmm, well, apparently the psychologists’ analysis of that,’ he nodded at the laptop, ‘is that Krymov displays paranoid psychotic tendencies that are getting worse. We have already moved from a state of cold peace with Russia towards what is now cold war, and we fear that he may push us into hot war soon. Frankly he could start a war with himself, he’s so paranoid. So…this is where you come in.’

      He looked pointedly at Alex, who gazed back at him, trying to think how he could be involved.

      ‘We have been approached by a contact within the Russian élite with a plan to overthrow Krymov. Although he is ostensibly a dictator, as I said, the Kremlin is in fact a hotbed of factional conflict—we saw that in action when Putin and Medvedev were deposed. The problem is that Krymov lacks the political skills to balance competing factions, so various people are not happy with the way he is leading the country. A lot of that is to do with the fact that they are not getting the slice of the financial pie that they wanted, but we can’t help their motives.’ He grimaced.

      ‘Now, our faction’s problem is that they are not strong enough to depose him outright and therefore need to repeat the sort of popular uprising that happened in 1991 when Yeltsin stood on that tank and was able to face down the KGB coup against Gorbachev. But in order to do that they need two things: one is control of the TV network to broadcast the revolt—and we are sure they can deliver that. The second is a popular figurehead to lead the rebellion. The guy running the faction is an oligarch who is resented by most people because of his money, so he couldn’t do it and will therefore stay very much in the background.

      ‘However, they do have the perfect candidate for the job: Roman Raskolnikov.’