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And the way the Russians do things, Semyonovich would be the only figure who really knew what was going on inside it. It’s not like a Western business model, where the head drops off—in this case Semyonovich’s—and things carry on as before. In the West, there’d be plenty of people, competent boards of directors and so on, who know exactly what the company consists of. If the boss drops off his perch, it all goes on more or less uninterrupted. But that’s not the Russian way. The Russians have an imperial attitude to business, with a single godhead who is all-seeing, all-knowing.”
    He looked up at Teddy. “There’ll be chaos, I should think. The stock prices of his companies are going to take a real hit. He, personally, was very much identified with the success or otherwise of his assets. The value of Semyonovich Inc. will plummet when the markets open tomorrow, you’ll see. And that will directly harm the Kremlin.”
    Adrian looked around the room, warming now to this theme.
    “But that’s just for starters,” he said. “We don’t know exactly what secret partnerships are woven into Semyonovich’s business empire—outside the stuff on his company nameplates, I mean. What else was he doing for his masters in Russia? We think he may have been running arms on the Kremlin’s behalf to Caucasian separatists, for example. Disrupting little pro-West republics like Georgia. Maybe he was funding East European, pro-Kremlin opposition groups? Particularly in Ukraine. That’s a possibility. But we’ll find out, you can be sure of that.”
    “There’ll be a lot of collateral damage,” Teddy said.
    “That’s about it,” Adrian agreed. “Semyonovich was a key figure for the Kremlin. He was in many ways a bellwether for their commercial expansion in the West. We’ll need to watch the Kremlin’s reaction in the coming weeks, as well as seeing what unravels elsewhere from Semyonovich’s death.”
    After the meeting had broken up, Teddy Parkinson unnecessarily repeated his offer to Adrian to come for lunch at his country home in Surrey, as if he’d just thought it up.
    Never mind the assassination of Semyonovich, Adrian was caressing the idea of an assassination of his own, and he needed Parkinson’s support. With the Russian refusal to extradite Bykov, there were no other options.
    He thought of the note addressed to him and pinned to Finn’s dead body outside the embassy in Berlin two years before.
    “Honour him in death,” it had ended. No matter how things had been left with Finn before he met his end, the SIS wasn’t going to let him down after it. Adrian would see that he got his revenge.

Chapter 5
    L OGAN WALKED SLOWLY BETWEEN the rows of plastic reclining chairs planted twenty deep along the beach. They were all either occupied or claimed by towels, magazines, half-empty bottles of wine, picnic baskets—all the detritus of the summer tourists.
    He’d taken a taxi from the industrial capital Podgorica, after his connection there from Belgrade and Marseille, down along Montenegro’s Adriatic coastline.
    Halfway to his destination, he’d paid off the taxi and taken a bus for the remaining twenty-five miles or so. It made slow progress along a winding road that traced the rocky shore broken with bays of fine curved beaches and dotted with islands where yachts were moored—some the second or even third vessel belonging to the Russian industrial barons.
    It was ten years since he’d last made this journey. The country was very different now from the time he’d been stationed in the Balkans. Prosperity had arrived in Montenegro, in the form of Russian money. Billions of Russian dollars had first sucked up the local production enterprises of any value to the Kremlin, then turned to tourist development.
    While the West was aiding the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, of which the tiny state of Montenegro was part, and notionally shoving it towards democracy, it was Russia that had then stepped in,