The Edge of Madness (4 page)

He crossed himself in the manner taught him by his mother, a good Orthodox Christian who had held to the faith even during the godless years of Communism. His hand moved slowly to the prescribed points about his body and came to rest over his heart. From the front seat of the vehicle his bodyguard watched every movement, yet beside him his son-in-law, Lavrenti, took no heed, his mind lost to the brain-scouring noises that were emanating from an electronic gadget jammed into his ears. It was some sort of multifunctional mobile phone. He was texting at the same time.

The presidential motorcade struggled to force its way through the groaning streets of the Russian capital in the direction of the air terminal at Sheremetyevo-1.
Shunin’s fingers drummed impatiently. He had no concerns about being late, of course, he wasn’t taking a scheduled flight. His private Rossiya-1 Airbus was already fuelled, secured, thrice-checked by his own personal flight crew, and stocked with his fishing gear. Wasn’t going to move without him. But he was an impatient man and fretted at the constant interruptions to their journey. Leningradsky Prospect was choked, not just with vehicles but with the interminable construction work, and the central-lane highway that was supposed to be reserved for official transport had become stuffed so tight it squeaked. The parts that weren’t blocked by lumbering cement trucks and double-parked delivery vans had been overwhelmed by the number of new cars, private cars, cars owned by individuals, not the state. Even the thought of such things would have had Stalin banging on his box. When he spoke publicly of such things Shunin called it progress, but now the thirty-minute journey to Sheremetyevo-1 was likely to take more than an hour, even for the leader of all the Russias. The FSB were supposed to block off the streets for him, but what could they do when the streets were already blocked by others? He’d given them no notice, just announced that he was leaving in two hours, on a whim, so they supposed, but for the moment he was going nowhere, just like those ankle-tappers of the Moscow Dynamos whose stadium they were passing, a ramshackle concrete coffin covered in gaudy advertising hoardings where
the hidden corners and stairwells stank of urine. Some things hadn’t changed.

They slowed almost to a standstill. Somewhere up ahead a truck loaded with steel pipes was backing out from a construction site and had succeeded in stuffing up the entire Prospect. And Shunin’s asthma was getting to him; he reached for his nebulizer and breathed in the comforting medicinal mist, but despite the relief he knew it was getting worse. The doctors had warned him, one day his lungs would get the better of him and he’d have to slow down, give up, or go just like his father. Shunin’s response had been to get himself new doctors. Now he took a deep breath and turned on his son-in-law in irritation. ‘Lavrik,’ he said, using the diminutive, ‘I am a reasonable man. I don’t mind you screwing my daughter, I don’t even object when you skim a few per cent from the contractors on your architectural projects, but I swear on the Holy Mother I’m not spending the next couple of days listening to you mash your brains to shit with that rubbish!’

The younger man looked up, bemused at the sudden onslaught. ‘It’s just a toy. Something a friend gave me, Papasha.’

‘A contractor.’

‘A friend,’ the son-in-law insisted.

‘It’s gold-plated.’

‘So, a good friend.’

‘Throw it out.’

Lavrenti laughed awkwardly.

‘Throw it out,’ his father-in-law repeated. He was not a man used to repeating himself.

‘Dammit, it’s worth five thousand US.’

‘A trinket.’

‘And mine.’

Shunin stared. He was a man of short stature with immensely broad shoulders, suggesting the sort of strength that in his younger days could have broken a horse with his bare hands. But the years, and the lungs, had got to him. In middle age his crinkled hair had grown thin and was now stretched desperately across his skull, giving the impression of a ploughed field, and he rarely smiled, for inside the Kremlin there was so little to smile about. A thick belt held his trousers round his wide waist, his shape was almost square, and when he walked he rolled from side to side, a man whose better days had been left behind at the roadside. Yet he was never a man to be underestimated, and anyone who did quickly found reason to regret their naivety. He had lost none of his legendary ability to switch from philosopher to huntsman in a single, wheezing breath, and although his neck might disappear into his collar the eyes were always sharp, cat-like, and gave the impression that they could see through people and leave them feeling unmasked. Now they were fixed on Lavrenti.

‘Do as I say, Lavrik.’ The instruction was delivered in a whisper like a wind rustling through a graveyard. It
was turning into yet another of his lessons in subservience.

‘Come on, Papasha, just because we’re stuck in this funeral procession, don’t take it out on me.’ But Lavrenti found no trace of humour in the other man’s expression. ‘Please, I need my phone,’ he murmured, but the plea froze to death in the space between them.

Shunin was like that. Took positions, stubborn, intransigent, but never pointless, always for a purpose. And so long as he was working over foreigners or Chechens the people loved him for it, they even sent each other postcards with his image on the front, showing him as a bulldog, a favourite pet guarding the home, but those who slept closer to him had reason to fear his moods.

And few slept closer than Lavrenti Konev. He was in his early thirties, one of the rising stars of this new Russia–how could he not be, so close to Shunin? But Russia had always been a place of suspicion and envy, and the new Russia had mixed into that potent gruel of mistrust the curdling power of money, mountains of it. The ancients of the Soviet era had rarely indulged in ostentatious wealth–oh, they had their dachas and their Zils, but none of it was personal property and most of it was poorly produced tat. Yet the days when the arrival of a refrigerator was cause for a street party were long since gone. Life had changed, and Lavrenti was part of that change. A media man.

He had come to Shunin’s attention when his daughter,
Katya, had brought him home at a time when Shunin had been under pressure from a political opponent, Kamenev. Within two weeks of Shunin meeting Lavrenti, a video of Kamenev had been aired on RTR, the state-run television channel, showing ‘a person resembling’ Kamenev fumbling around with two much younger women. Exposing him to such ridicule was as good as putting him up in front of a firing squad; even before the world had finished laughing. Kamenev was gone, Lavrenti Konev was in, and ever since Shunin had allowed the younger man to run the media side of things. Lavrenti had become election mastermind, propagandist, chief censor and son-in-law, and had spread his wings into ever more lucrative enterprises. He’d masterminded the campaign that brought together a subtle mix of persuasion, corruption and intimidation which had persuaded the International Olympic Committee to award the winter games to the town of Sochi, a resort on the Black Sea where even in January the temperatures rarely touch freezing. Not an ideal location for snow and ice, some people thought, but an ideal spot to make a fortune from the property market. He learned quickly. While Shunin rode a white horse in public, more privately the son-in-law cleaned up the mess that was inevitably left behind. It had become a fruitful partnership.

Deep down, Shunin hoped that one day Lavrenti might do more, become more–perhaps and in time even his successor. Yet Lavrenti was his son-in-law and there were still areas of power that Shunin had shielded
from him. Lavrenti had never been asked to get his hands dirty–really dirty, in the Russian way, Shunin had protected him from that. The hands that touched his daughter must be clean. Yet if Lavrenti were to grow, to follow in his footsteps, there must come a time when he would have to show his mettle, be tested. But in the meantime there could be only one master in any house, and Lavrenti needed to be reminded of it.

Already the guard had turned from his seat in front and was holding out a demanding hand.

‘It’s such a waste,’ Lavrenti objected. ‘Ridiculous. I need it.’

‘Not on this trip, you won’t. And if that toy means so much to you, I’m sure you can always get your very good friend to give you another.’

‘For God’s sake, this is pathetic.’

‘So is being bought for the price of a golden trinket.’

‘Nobody’s bought me!’ Lavrenti spat back, rising to the bait.

‘Then prove it.’

The younger man tried to hold Shunin’s gaze, hoping for a reprieve, but none came. They rarely did.

‘May Heaven piss on your picnic, Papasha,’ Lavrenti snapped in defiance before thrusting the phone at the guard, who released a lock and opened the door by a fraction, just sufficient for the gadget to be dropped in the track of the vehicle’s wheels. Half a ton of pressure beneath each wheel would do for most things; a mere gadget would have no chance, even if it was gold-plated.
Lavrenti sank sullenly back into his seat, where he began chewing savagely at a fingernail, one of the disconcerting habits he’d picked up recently–and one of the reasons why Shunin watched, and wondered. There was so much for a leader to wonder about in this new world, even a son-in-law.

They had been stationary too long; the guard was growing anxious, muttering into his radio. Then, with a wave of his hand, he directed the driver to squeeze his way off the road and onto the pavement. The car rose up the kerb with a bump. Pedestrians looked on in bewilderment, their faces turning bright with panic before throwing themselves to one side as the convoy carved its way towards them, twisting around lampposts, at one point running over a hastily abandoned bicycle. A whiskery old man emerging from a shop doorway waved his rolled-up newspaper in protest, being either too blind to see, or too old to care what they might do to him. Then, with a nod of the bonnet, they had regained the roadway at a point beyond the cement truck and were speeding away. Before long they had left the city behind and were out into the greener suburbs of Khimki, yet even here they found disruption. Huge billboards were scattered along the roadside like pine cones on the forest floor, screaming the merits of everything from Starbucks to IKEA, while the open fields that had once protected the approaches to Moscow were disappearing beneath a sprawl of ugly shopping malls.

‘Ah, the Wild West,’ Shunin quipped sardonically.

Everywhere was being ripped apart and once more they were forced to slow as they squeezed into a road tunnel being cut beneath a development that would soon be a new mega-mall. One day the road on which they were travelling would be an eight-lane expressway that would stretch all the way to Sheremetyevo, but for the moment it was just another construction site and soon the presidential cavalcade found itself on a diversion that reduced its speed to less than thirty. The FSB guard was once more glancing nervously around him as the police motorcycle outriders pulled over all other traffic in the tunnel to give the convoy free passage. Amongst those vehicles was an airport shuttle bus covered in so much summer dust that the sign announcing it was out of service was all but obliterated; it sat glowering in the tunnel as the motorcade approached, its exhaust belching dark, impatient smoke. The first vehicles of the convoy snaked past, waved on by the outriders, but as the rest began to follow the long yellow vehicle lurched forward, as though the clutch had slipped, and veered towards the path of the presidential limousine, forcing Shunin’s driver to hit his brakes. Suddenly the air was filled with the sound of car horns and security sirens bouncing off the tunnel walls. From the front seat, the guard shouted in alarm.

The breath was still leaving the guard’s lungs when the driver of the shuttle bus flicked a switch on his
dashboard. It wasn’t a standard switch but one that had been specially installed and led via a wriggling length of wire to the luggage compartment beneath the seats. There it met a shaped armour-piercing charge in the form of an anti-tank shell, the sort of thing that slices through armour plate to a depth of seven or eight times its own diameter. And that was the moment the shell detonated.

Thursday afternoon. Outside Moscow.

The presidential limousine had been supplied by a specialist subsidiary of BMW and was equipped with many kinds of protective armour. It was also fitted with electronic counter-measures that blocked radio signals in the vicinity and prevented any bomb being detonated by remote control. But the armour couldn’t withstand a direct hit by a shaped charge, and even the finest ECM on earth was worthless in a suicide attack. As the blast wave from the explosion began to force its way down the tunnel, a jet of metal penetrated the limousine, creating an overpressure that instantly killed everyone inside. Even if one or more of the passengers had miraculously survived the initial blast, it would have served no purpose. When the fuel tanks ruptured, what was left of the BMW turned into a metal-melting inferno. Not even the fillings in their teeth survived.

Yet Shunin had. He’d not been in the presidential limousine, but instead had been riding alongside
Lavrenti in one of the lead cars of the convoy. In recent years those who wished to see the President dead–and there were many–had grown bolder, particularly the Chechens, and there were several small armies of other separatists, too. Shunin’s life was constantly at risk yet he was not a man to cower behind the thick walls of the Kremlin. He refused to hide, so those who were responsible for his security made a habit of trying to throw his pursuers off the scent, disseminating false information about his whereabouts and travel plans, switching his car or his plane at the last minute. In the garage beneath the Kremlin they had placed Shunin in one of the accompanying security vehicles, the one in which his son-in-law was travelling. And it had saved his life.

It had been a close call. Their black Mercedes SUV still caught the impact of the blast, hit from behind by the remorseless fist of expanding gases and debris that threatened to roll the vehicle over, yet although the tyres screeched and the driver screamed, it remained upright. The support vehicle was armoured, it absorbed the worst of the blow, and the SUV settled back on its wheels, its occupants shaken but unhurt. Soon it was surrounded by a posse of armed presidential guards, each more nervous than the rest, their eyes flooded with alarm and their hands filled with weapons.

‘Are you hurt,
gospodin
, Mr President?’ his bodyguard demanded.

Shunin’s chest was heaving, he was short of breath, but there was no sign of panic. He reached for his nebulizer, sucked on it, his lungs slowly opening like a butterfly’s wings stretching in the sun. He ran a hand across his head to rearrange the strands of hair that had fallen from grace, and only then did he turn to his bodyguard. ‘It seems it is not yet my time to die, Yuri Anatolyevich, not until the path to Hell is paved with the bones of ten thousand Chechens. We still have some way to go.’

‘Thank God!’

‘Yes. We may both thank God.’ He touched the crucifix that hung beneath his shirt. ‘But not the man who told them of our plans. He will be begging to swap his life with a catamite from the slums of Africa when we find him.’ He stared intently at the guard, searching for any flicker of guilt. Yuri Anatolyevich had been at his side for many years, and yet the source who had supplied the bombers with the information must also be very close to him. No one was above suspicion. He turned to his son-in-law. ‘And you, Lavrik? Will I yet become a grandfather?’

Lavrenti’s face was ashen but he nodded slowly. He had given no cry of alarm, there were no tears of relief or shaking. He sat silent, grim, but seemingly in control. A test passed.

And within seconds they were speeding away from the scene of his would-be assassination, the guard shouting into his radio and prodding a gun at the
driver’s ribs, just in case he needed encouragement. Now they travelled at very high speed, forcing other cars off the road as the SUV careened away from the scene until eventually Shunin ordered the driver to pull over. The bodyguard protested but Shunin was a man who made his own rules and, with Yuri Anatolyevich still mouthing protests, he heaved himself out of the car and gazed back towards the scene of the carnage. In the distance noxious, oil-stained smoke spilled from the mouth of the tunnel, billowing high into the humid summer air.

‘You’ve beaten them, Papasha,’ Lavrenti muttered grimly.

‘Perhaps. But in this game they only need to get lucky once.’

‘Please, Mr President, get back into the car,’ the guard interrupted, a bead of sweat sprouting on his brow. ‘We must get you to Zhukovsky.’ It was the military base about twenty-five miles from Moscow, a place of safety in times of trouble when even the Kremlin itself might not be safe. Shunin shook his head.

‘No. We continue.’

‘But—’

‘No stinking sewer rat from Chechnya’s going to change my plans,’ Shunin snapped.

‘Mr President,’ the bodyguard repeated, but this time more feebly, ‘the people–they will need to see that you are unhurt.’

‘The people can wait,’ Shunin insisted, ‘the fish won’t. Come on, Lavrik, get back in the car.’

The guard looked at the son-in-law in despair. It was one of those moods he knew he couldn’t deflect. This was wrong, very wrong, Yuri Anatolyevich had standing orders for moments of crisis such as this, and carrying on with a fishing trip didn’t feature in them. So he could disobey his commanding officer, or he could deny his President. Either way, he’d likely end up buried in the brown stuff. Yet Sergei Illich was a man after his own heart. Some twenty years earlier Shunin had been a senior KGB operative, head of section in East Berlin at the time the Wall was being pulled down, when a crowd had tried to storm the local KGB building and ransack its records. Shunin had stood on the steps, solid like a block of granite and armed with nothing more than eyes that could freeze a man’s will, like a rabbit loses his mind in the headlights. The mob had seen him, and faltered.

‘Your beloved West is over that way,’ Shunin had declared, pointing a thick finger in the direction of the Wall, ‘not behind these doors!’

And those East Germans, so conditioned to having their minds made up for them, had turned, and by deflecting them Shunin had saved an entire network of collaborators from being exposed. After that, his rise had been meteoric, and long ago Yuri Anatolyevich had decided he would happily die for this man, and yet, if that were his wish, how much better to go fishing with him.
He came to attention, held open the car door, and, with an uncharacteristic screech of tyres, they set off once more.

Thursday afternoon. Behind Downing Street.

It had stopped raining. Harry’s steps scrunched across the gravel of Horse Guards Parade as he left Downing Street the way he had arrived, anonymously, by the back door.

‘Tell no one,’ the Prime Minister had instructed, ‘not even the birds.’

‘That we’re about to go to war? What war, Mark?’

But D’Arby had shaken his head, wouldn’t say.

‘And why me?’

‘Because you have background, Harry, and because you have balls. You’ve more experience in the tangled world of security than almost anyone in the country. I shall need to lean on that.’

True enough. A career in the British army that had included active service not only in the First Gulf War but any number of other, less official wars. Harry had been at the sharp end, and had the scars to show for it. Fifteen years on, his military career had been exchanged for one in Parliament, where he’d become a Minister and a man on the move, one to watch, but Harry always had a stubborn streak that had never endeared him to his superiors. The army had tried to march the individuality out of him, the government had preferred to squeeze it out of him by giving him office, but neither
had succeeded. He remained stubbornly his own man, yet it was precisely that bloody-mindedness that had saved the life of the Queen. After that, Harry Jones had been able to do whatever he liked–except, it seemed, spend the afternoon screwing a beautiful lawyer from New York.

‘Mark, you’ve got an entire government machine at your disposal. And your Cabinet colleagues. You don’t need me.’

The Prime Minister had offered a bitter smile. ‘Who could I trust? Tricia Willcocks?’

Ah, dear Tricia. The most self-centred woman in government. A mouth full of spite and a dress full of ferrets. Harry had crossed swords with her and hadn’t always emerged victorious. ‘A piranha in pantyhose, I grant you, but she happens to be your Foreign Secretary.’

‘Precisely. And may her travels be arduous and almost infinite,’ D’Arby sighed. The lack of trust was evidently mutual.

‘Then what about the others? Defence? The Home Secretary?’

‘I can’t trust them, Harry, not completely, not as much as I need to. Defence would blab to his wife, while our esteemed Home Secretary would go bragging to his diary secretary. He’s sleeping with her, you know. They’d talk, and someone would hear about it. I can’t risk that. No, I’ve thought about this long and hard and I haven’t found any sleep for three days, but
the conclusion is still the same. You’re the only man for the job.’

‘And what job is that, exactly?’

Still D’Arby wouldn’t explain. ‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘not even in here.’

They had returned from the garden to the Cabinet Room by this point, and D’Arby placed both hands on Harry’s shoulders. ‘I must ask you to trust me, Harry. To be my guide, my support, and perhaps even my conscience.’

The Prime Minister had smiled reassuringly, but up close Harry thought he could smell fear.

‘And be prepared never to tell a soul about any of it,’ the Prime Minister had continued. ‘I must ask you to promise me that.’

‘You want me to swear an oath or something?’

‘No. I want you to trust me, just as I trust you.’

Trusted with everything but the truth, it seemed. ‘How do I prepare for this weekend? What do I bring?’

‘Nothing more than a change of clothes, my friend. One night, two at the most.’

Nights in which Harry wanted to be elsewhere, with others–no, just with Gabbi. He’d spent the last couple of years since his divorce screwing around, trying to forget, but for the first time he wanted something more. It seemed he wasn’t going to get it.

Harry spilled in confusion onto Horse Guards, setting off on foot for his home in Mayfair, stretching out, trying to walk off his concerns. As he crossed the Mall,
that broad tree-lined avenue that led up towards Buckingham Palace, he found it decked in flags. Blythe Harrison Edwards, the US President, had arrived for a state visit and the Union flag hung alongside the Stars and Stripes from the flagpoles, damply, like drying shirts. Instinctively his back stiffened, the shoulders went back.

‘This isn’t about me, Harry, you understand, it’s for our country’–D’Arby’s last words as Harry had left. Never had he been asked to serve as blindly as this.

Yet as he sprang out into the Mall, dodging the speeding cars, he remembered that wasn’t quite the truth. Twenty years earlier he had been serving in Northern Ireland. An untidy war, on both sides. It had its rules, of course, and Harry like everyone else in the army was supposed to carry a Yellow Card spelling out the rules of engagement: what he could and couldn’t do; whom he could kill and when the killing was supposed to stop. Queen’s Regulations. But it hadn’t always worked like that. Anyway, Harry was SAS, they had their own rules, the sort that were never written down on paper.

It had been a good night, up to that point. He’d nabbed a three-man IRA unit half asleep, scratching their crotches in their parked van, weapons neatly stacked behind, and he’d brought the guns back to HQ for the forensics boys to figure out when they’d last been fired and which poor bastard had been on the receiving end, but no one seemed interested in the bloody guns. There
was a flap on, something big. And they wanted Harry. In a small back room, squeezed around a table and almost hidden behind a pall of cigarette smoke, he had discovered the Head of Military Intelligence, the Head of the Special Branch and his own commanding officer. When he walked in they all sprang to their feet, as though startled, caught in some guilty act.

‘Hello, Harry. We’ve been waiting for you,’ his CO croaked in a voice dried hoarse by nicotine.

Then his CO took him to one side, another cigarette, this time outside in the car park, and in the dispassionate manner of a mathematician setting out a theorem he had explained how Harry might do a great service for his country. It wasn’t an order, not even a request, for the CO took care to explain that it was a discussion that couldn’t possibly be taking place. ‘Harry–you understand? And if anyone ever asks, I’ll deny it to my dying day. No one must know.’ Then, like Mark D’Arby, the CO asked Harry to trust him. ‘Just as I must trust you, with everything. My career. My honour. With my life.’

Harry had left by the back door on that occasion, too.

And that had ended in murder.

Thursday afternoon. The Balmoral Estate, Aberdeenshire.

The summer heat had grown oppressive, leaving Scotland simmering like a skillet on the stove. On the moors of Aberdeenshire, life had slowed to a crawl.
Red deer hugged the shade of the pines, conserving their energies for the rutting season that still lay ahead, firewatchers in their towers found their eyes growing heavy, while even the plump grouse, in their prime and threatened with imminent annihilation as the days ticked by towards August, had grown lethargic. In every corner, life slowed down, yet Blythe Edwards found it impossible to relax. Give no clues, that’s what the Prime Minister had told her. Be normal, act normal, play normal. But what, Blythe Edwards asked herself, was normal? D’Arby had taken her aside the previous evening during the state banquet at Buckingham Palace and had begun whispering in her ear, words that had tumbled into her already troubled mind and almost overwhelmed it. Troubles never came in single file. As the other guests had seen them talking they had been given a wide berth to allow them a little privacy. If only she could put such distance between herself and what he had told her. No sudden change of plan, he had urged with as much strength as he could muster, let no one take notice. So now, as everything threatened to fall to pieces about her, she sat beside a whispering river that nudged its way down from the heather hills above Balmoral as if she hadn’t a care in the world.