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came with no guard of honour, no evident security, not even a maintenance crew. Standing alone at the bottom of the steps was Shunin’s own personal pilot, who offered a crisp salute.
    ‘Greetings, Boris Abramovitch. Is everything prepared?’
    ‘Over a few broken bodies, Mr President.’
    ‘So long as they were broken quietly.’
    The pilot nodded.
    A few steps behind, Shunin’s guard was fidgeting in uncertainty as he stood beside the driver. ‘ Gospodin , Mr President–what are my instructions? Forgive me, but how am I to explain this?’
    The question brought Shunin to a halt. He had his back to the guard. For a moment, he hung his head, as though considering his response. When at last heturned, his voice was quiet, little more than a dry wheeze. ‘You don’t.’
    ‘ Gospodin ?’
    ‘There has already been too much gossip about my travel plans.’
    Yuri Anatolyevich stiffened in alarm. He’d been with Shunin too long, he knew his moods, how quick they were to turn. He made no sound, offered no protest, but his eyes widened in accusation. He looked into his President’s mirthless face and an absurd thought suddenly struck him. In all the time he had served Shunin he had never once seen him smile. Why? Why didn’t the bastard ever smile? It was as if everything in his life came down to business, nothing was ever personal, no loyalty to anything, or to anyone but Russia.
    Yuri Anatolyevich realized he was going to die, without understanding why and without ever truly knowing Shunin even after all those years. He could have lived to a hundred without figuring the man out, and he would very much like to have lived to a hundred, or at least to his next birthday, but Shunin was holding a pistol on him and…For the briefest of moments, Yuri Anatolyevich thought he saw a flicker on the other man’s face. He actually smiled!
    Two sharp retorts echoed across the tarmac, and they were gone, first the guard, then the driver. Two bodies crumpled on the tarmac, stains spreading across their chests.
    ‘Holy Mother!’ breathed Lavrenti. ‘What the hell did they do?’
    ‘They died for the Fatherland,’ Shunin replied, touching the crucifix beneath his shirt before kissing the tips of his fingers. ‘Now get on board. We have no time to waste.’
    The son-in-law had no intention of arguing. With one last look at the welling blood, he did precisely as he was told.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Thursday evening. Buckinghamshire.
    Harry drove himself to Chequers. There wasn’t much traffic that time of the evening, it took him less than an hour. The storm front had passed but it was still stifling so he put the top down on his Audi coupé and let the air slap his cheeks, hoping it might blow away his concerns. The country roads of Buckinghamshire unwound before him through the Chiltern hills and he had to struggle to keep his speed down to sixty. He’d been taught to drive by his father on the roads that lead back into the hills from the coastline of the south of France. Their first lesson had been in a three-litre 1924 Bentley with a thundering leather strap around its bonnet–completely over the top, of course, but then his father was always that way. ‘Any idle bloody gendarme stops us, Harry, and they’ll be wanting a ride rather than issuing a ticket,’ his father had told him. For additional insurance against the censure of the forces of law and order they’d also taken along his father’s latest mistress with skirts thatblew up around her waist. Mad bugger, his father. Now, with his old man’s laughter ringing in his ears and the village of Speen disappearing in his rear-view mirror, Harry put his foot down.
    Chequers was a sixteenth-century country house of red bricks and towering Tudor chimneys that a hundred years earlier had been presented to the nation as a country retreat for its Prime Ministers, a place for them to relax, although in recent years they rarely did. Harry had neither pass nor written invitation, but