Stephen Leather: True Colours

He left the selection to his bodyguards; they knew his taste in women — stick thin, very young and almost androgynous blondes — and he took his pleasures with them the way he took his business opportunities, with a single-minded, ruthless self-interest, indifferent to who he might hurt in the process. If the whores were sometimes a little bruised or bloody after their encounters with him, then a tip of a couple of hundred dollars more would usually stifle their complaints, and if not, well, they were only whores after all, and he was a billionaire, an oligarch, one of the richest men on the planet. His money, his influence and, if necessary, his lawyers could make almost any problem go away.

The sound of a fresh voice, as irritating to him as the whine of a mosquito, intruded on his thoughts. The ‘Hausfrau’, as he called her — the German Chancellor — had risen to her feet and was now bringing the proceedings to a close for the day but, to her visible frustration, the meeting was breaking up without having reached any significant agreement on a way forward.

Buryakov listened with mounting irritation as the Hausfrau repeated her earlier demands for guaranteed power supplies to the West. Buryakov knew that by the West she mean Germany, as Germany had just pulled the plug on their nuclear power programme and needed to replace that power from somewhere. She ended her address with a call for further talks between the officials — ‘This evening, and all night if necessary,’ she said, rapping the edge of the podium with her knuckles for added emphasis — in order to conclude some form of compromise agreement that could then be announced to the waiting media before the conference broke up at noon the following day.

Despite his irritation with her, Buryakov smiled to himself. The Hausfrau was desperate for something she could sell to her electorate as a success, but making the German voters happy with their Chancellor was neither in his own commercial interest, nor that of the Russian government. If she wanted an agreement, there would be a heavy price to pay for it.

All through the Cold War, the West had lectured the Soviet Union on the merits of the capitalist system and they had treated the fall of the Berlin Wall as its ultimate triumph. They could hardly complain now, he thought, if their former adversary had learned the lesson so well that it was now using the capitalist system to its own considerable advantage. His smile broadened. He would let the Hausfrau and her allies fret and sweat into the small hours as they tried to find some common ground, while he enjoyed an untroubled night, and in the morning he would see what price he could make her pay for the piece of paper she would wave before the television cameras at the end of the conference.

As the meeting broke up, he pushed back his chair and began making his slow way out of the conference room. As he emerged, his bodyguard team leader, who had been waiting outside the room with the other heads of security while their principals argued inside, took his place alongside him. They made their way through the crowds filling the cavernous foyer of the palace. The rest of his security team had been required to wait outside the building, stamping their feet in the cold for hours.

There was semi-organised chaos inside and outside the palace, with everyone milling about in the foyer, waiting for word that their own limousines had reached the entrance before venturing outside, while the security personnel outside tried to bring some order to the logjam of vehicles. Inevitably the politicians whose vehicles were first in the queue would have paused on their way out for a final discussion with an ally or foe, and the other cars would be blocked, unable to move.

The Cold War was long over, but the tensions between East and West were still there, and Buryakov’s lip curled as he stared out of the great windows at the queue of luxury cars and limousines. All of them — Mercedes, BMWs and even the Rolls-Royces — made by German companies. The thought of that flagship British brand being bought from under their arrogant noses only briefly lightened Buryakov’s mood and his frown deepened as he saw the Hausfrau standing in the doorway of the conference room, still arguing her case with another Russian oligarch. He was a close friend and ally of Buryakov’s and he knew that he shared Buryakov’s contempt for the German politician.

The Germans were not to be trusted, Buryakov knew. Not after two world wars. His own father had taught him that. He could remember many years ago sitting on a threadbare sofa with father in front of a black and white television set watching what passed for the news in Soviet Russia. ‘When a Russian stranglehold is on their throat, the Germans will roll over and beg, but they will never stop looking for a chance to put their own foot on the throat of the Russian bear instead,’ his father had growled, grabbing young Yuri by the scruff of the neck and shaking him to make his point. ‘If we allow them to, they will make use of our natural resources to make their own economy even more powerful, and then one day, when they are ready, the German armies will once more roll eastwards to attack Mother Russia yet again.’

‘I don’t like this, we should be allowed our men inside,’ muttered Buryakov’s head of security, a burly Latvian. Andris Gordin had served Buryakov for more than ten years, first as a driver then as a bodyguard and for the past three years as his head of security, and at times seemed to regard Buryakov less as a boss and more as a younger brother to be taken care of. Buryakov was sure that given the chance, the Latvian would happily have wiped Buryakov’s arse and flushed the toilet for him.

‘You worry too much, Andris,’ admonished Buryakov. ‘It’s protocol.’

‘Fuck protocol,’ said Gordin. ‘They shouldn’t keep us standing around like this.’

Buryakov chuckled quietly. ‘My friend, if they were going to kill anyone here it would be the politicians,’ he said. ‘Not the businessmen.’

Gordin stared stone-faced at the queue of cars outside. One of the bodyguard teams waved and Gordin waved back. He hadn’t been allowed to bring his transceiver into the building so hand signals were the only way of communicating with his team. The bodyguard outside shrugged and Gordin raised his hands in an exaggerated show of frustration.

They moved slowly towards the exit, Gordin clearly uncomfortable at being surrounded by so many people. ‘This is madness,’ he muttered.

Buryakov nodded but said nothing. He looked to his left. Standing close by was a powerfully built man in an immaculate pinstriped suit. He had the ice-cold eyes of an international banker and he looked right through Burykov. He was carrying a furled umbrella, a good call as the sky was threatening rain. Buryakov smiled and nodded, acknowledging their mutual frustration, but the man ignored him and looked away. Typical banker, thought Buryakov. Thought he was better than everyone else.

They were making slow progress towards the exit when everybody stopped dead as the American Secretary of State emerged from an anteroom. As usual she was surrounded by her phalanx of crew-cut, huge and hostile bodyguards. Only the Americans were allowed to bring in their own people, a ruling that Gordin had taken as a personal insult. ‘Fucking Americans,’ Gordin muttered. ‘They act like they own the world.’ And to add to the insult, the American bodyguards were allowed to carry weapons.

As usual the American contingent made straight for the doors at high speed, barging straight past those in front of them and knocking them out of the way. As they passed through the metal detectors, all hell broke loose. The entrance to the building had been set up with security screens, scanners and metal, gas and explosive detectors, but they were designed to stop people getting in, not getting out. As the heavily armed American bodyguards barged their way through, the alarm on every metal detector in the place began shrieking. Within seconds the entrance hall had dissolved into complete chaos, with people trying to shout above the noise of the detector alarms, and bodyguard team leaders and delegates jostling and shoving, trying to regroup after being elbowed aside by the Americans.