Day of the Long Knives: The Ruslan Shanidza Novels, #3

By Paul Clark

How do you bring down a President who will stop at nothing to stay in power?

Olympic hero turned peace campaigner Ruslan Shanidza sets out on his most ambitious undertaking, as he puts himself at the head of a campaign to unseat the brutal strongman who rules his post-communist homeland.

He assembles a fractious coalition of rivals and former enemies. But they must confront some very dangerous people: men with blood on their hands who know they can never allow their grip on power to slip.

The conflict quickly escalates. Espionage, blackmail and intimidation give way to arrests, beatings and assassinations as the President and his cronies plot a murderous crackdown. Ruslan soon learns that he has placed himself and his family right in the firing line in an increasingly desperate fight to the finish.

"Clark uses real events as inspiration, weaving history into an engaging narrative…told through the story of Ruslan and his family alongside a cast of other (many unsavoury) characters. It's a style I enjoy…It's also engaging in a way that I found myself thinking about it while I wasn't reading it… Although the last in a trilogy (and I haven't read the others), that didn't hold me back and it can be read as a standalone."

 

Lachlan Page, author of Magical Disinformation and The General of Caracas

"…the quality of the characters depicted in this book was superb. The author did an amazing job at comprehensively developing the characters by giving them really strong personalities that will stick with the reader till the end of the story.
"…gripped my interest throughout the entire book due to its powerful message of freedom from tyranny. The political and military aspects of the book were very intriguing...
"I recommend this book to lovers of historical fiction and thrillers...if you seek a great read, Day of the Long Knives by Paul Clark is the book for you."

 

OnlineBookClub.Org Official Review

"…this one captivated me since I have a history with Russia particular during some of the transition from the USSR. While this is fictional, much of what he writes smacks of a true-life adventure…The characters come alive and are well developed as he weaves into their personal lives a most credible backstory…will keep you engaged and attentive to discover the next twist in the script."

 

BM Goodreads Reviewer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Friston Books Ltd
• Release date: Feb 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201191993

Paul Clark

Paul Clark was born in the Forest of Dean and grew up in Coventry and Manchester. He graduated in modern history and became a teacher of English as a foreign language. He has lived in Italy and Thailand and has worked with people from more than 70 countries. He lives with his wife in Sussex. They have two grown-up children. This is his first novel.

Book preview

Part One

APRIL 1993

RONKONI, EAST KSORDIA

Chapter One

THE Security Police came just after dinner. A dozen of them, led by a man with bushy, frowning eyebrows that met in the middle, raided Ruslan Shanidza’s house and arrested him. All the shouting and the chaos terrified his little two-year-old, and Ruslan could see that his wife Tamara was very frightened too.

‘Don’t worry,’ he told her as they led him away. ‘I’m not afraid.’

In fact, he was very afraid, in spite of having spent the best part of a month preparing for this moment.

He soon found himself in the back of a black Volga, handcuffed to a member of the Security Police, escorted by four motorbikes, jumping all the lights as they bounced along the pot-holed streets of Ksordia’s bankrupt capital, sirens blazing.

Once inside Security Police headquarters, he was taken down into the bowels of the building. Ruslan knew the place well enough, as the KGB had held him there when they arrested him some 13 years earlier.

He also knew the routine they would follow. He wouldn’t see daylight again until his interrogation was over. They would keep him awake and fight him with tiredness, hunger and thirst.

They would interrogate him in shifts, and he remembered all too well how good they were at their job. He knew how easily they had outwitted him last time and was determined not to make the same mistakes again. He would refuse to answer their questions with anything but abuse. He would barely engage with them in conversation, even the so-called good cops. Especially the good cops. They were the most dangerous of all.

This was a risky strategy. After all, if they couldn’t defeat him by exhausting him and tripping him up during his interrogation, then they might resort to physical force. That would be the real test. Ruslan hoped he was ready for it.

They made him strip in front of half a dozen officers. As a former athlete, Ruslan was used to taking his clothes off in front of other men, so this was no big deal. If anything, he was more self-conscious about the mass of scar tissue on his back than about being naked below the waist.

They gave him a prison uniform: old dirty-white underpants, ill-fitting black trousers and a blue shirt. No socks, no shoes, no pullover. They took his fingerprints and photographs. They let him piss and frogmarched him into a room where the man with bushy eyebrows was waiting for him, a thick file on his desk, a younger officer by his side.

‘Surname?’

‘You know my bloody name.’

‘Surname?’

‘I’m not playing your stupid games.’

‘What’s your surname?’

‘Go fuck your mother.’

‘It’s for the record. It’s procedure.’

‘Look in my file then. I’m sure it’s got it there.’ Ruslan could see that he had given his interrogator a surprise. ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘What’s your name?’

‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’

‘Have it your way. What’s the charge?’

The interrogator grinned. ‘Drug smuggling and racketeering.’

‘What?’

‘Drug smuggling and racketeering. You’re facing up to fifteen years in prison, so I suggest you co-operate.’

‘Who the hell came up with that?’

‘Witnesses.’

‘Donkey shit.’

‘We’ve got rather a lot of evidence against you. So, let’s start at the beginning. What’s your surname?’

Ruslan stared at him. He couldn’t believe it. Drug smuggling? Where had that come from?

‘Surname?’

Ruslan shook his head to bring himself back to the present. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’

‘I’ve never been more serious.’

‘Look, either you know as well as I do that this is all lies, or else you’re the thickest cop in the whole of Ronkoni and you actually believe it. It doesn’t bother me which, but you’d better get one thing into your head: I have no intention of playing your stupid game.’

‘Surname?’

‘Go fuck yourself.’

Chapter Two

ONE MONTH EARLIER

TENGIZ Alavidza, the Minister of the Interior, wasn’t quite sure how to play this meeting. He knew exactly what his visitor had come to say. He had said the same thing to President Korgay just two days ago, but he also knew how important it was for him to toe the line. If word got out that he had expressed doubts about the President to a paramilitary commander, it would make it look as if Ruslan Shanidza’s arrival in the capital had unsettled him.

Which, as it happened, was true.

More to the point, the President would fly into a rage if he found out. Alavidza had enough problems and had no intention of adding a mauling at Korgay’s hands.

He looked up at his official, who was waiting attentively just inside the door.

‘Yes, bring him in.’

‘Yes, sir. Will you require me to take notes?’

‘No. This will be just the two of us.’

‘Will you require refreshments, sir?’

‘Maybe.’

The official disappeared and came back a few minutes later, leading Vakhtan Mingrelsky into Alavidza’s ornate office. Alavidza got up from behind his polished desk and greeted Mingrelsky with the customary four kisses.

The two men were quite different in appearance. Alavidza was tall, skinny and slightly stooped, wearing his trademark three-piece suit. He looked every one of his 59 years, and his wispy grey hair was getting thin on top. He had often thought about dyeing it, as President Korgay did, but his wife said only women should dye their hair, and he was inclined to agree.

Mingrelsky was equally tall, but he was a man in his physical prime, with an arrogant walk and a strong, masculine face. His combat uniform accentuated his athletic figure, and on his head was a black beret with the white eagle emblem of his private army.

Alavidza had no illusions about the man he was dealing with. Mingrelsky might be a useful instrument, but he was a dangerous man, almost certainly a psychopath, and someone who needed to be constrained, as Alavidza had learned to his cost.

At the height of the Ksord-Akhtarian War, Mingrelsky’s White Eagles had numbered some 600 men, recruited from football hooligans and his pre-war criminal gang.

They had excelled in the brutal but, in Alavidza’s eyes, the necessary task of driving Akhtarian civilians from areas held by the Ksords. They hadn’t just done this out of patriotic fervour; they were also motivated by the opportunities for plunder that it gave them, with the added bonus of occasional access to defenceless Akhtarian women and girls.

Mingrelsky’s men had also played a big part in the Onchi’Aketi massacre, in which some 250 Akhtarian POWs and civilians had been slaughtered. Alavidza had encouraged Korgay to order these killings, in an effort to break the morale of Akhtarian troops by showing them the fate they should expect if they were ever captured.

By the autumn, stalemate on the battlefield brought an end to widespread looting, forcing Mingrelsky to pare back his forces to a hard core of just 200 men, though he had recently beefed their numbers up again in anticipation of war in Central Kubania, a war that had failed to materialise, thanks in large part to Ruslan Shanidza’s meddling.

As the two men sat down, Alavidza congratulated Mingrelsky on his marriage to Ksordia’s most glamorous TV game-show hostess and gave him an American Dunhill cigarette.

‘Tea or coffee?’

‘Coffee.’

‘Shall we correct it?’

Mingrelsky nodded.

Alavidza turned to his official. ‘Bring a pot of coffee and a bottle of vodka.’

‘Russkaya or Krepkaya, sir?’

Alavidza hated drinking before lunch, and Krepkaya vodka was little better than paint stripper, but when you were with your pet psychopath, it paid to show him that you were as hard as he was.

He looked at Mingrelsky and raised an eyebrow. ‘Krepkaya?’

Mingrelsky agreed and the official disappeared.

‘So, Vakhtan, what brings you here?’

‘Well,’ said Mingrelsky, ‘you’ve seen the news.’

‘You mean our friend Ruslan Shanidza?’

‘Yes.’

Alavidza had indeed seen the news. In fact, he had hardly had a decent night’s sleep since Shanidza announced his intention to bring down the Korgay regime. He worried that Korgay seriously underestimated the threat they were facing.

But he wasn’t allowed to let Mingrelsky know that.

‘Everything’s under control.’

‘That’s what you said in Central Kubania.’

‘Well, it was under control, until one of your goons shot Leila Meipariani.’

‘Don’t imagine you can pin that on me.’ Mingrelsky jabbed his finger at Alavidza. ‘You told me to keep them out of the areas I controlled. You said a small body count would be acceptable but I wasn’t to touch Shanidza.’

‘I said, Don’t touch Shanidza or anyone important.’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘Yes, I did.’

The two men glared at each other. Alavidza couldn’t remember exactly what he had said, but he certainly hadn’t expected Mingrelsky to order the killing of somebody so prominent.

‘Just know this,’ said Mingrelsky. ‘If I go down for Leila Meipariani, I take you down with me.’

‘Nobody’s going down for anything.’

‘You’d better make sure I don’t.’

Leila Meipariani had been one of Ksordia-Akhtaria’s biggest pop stars in the final years of the Soviet era. Half Ksord and half Tatar, she made her name by translating Tatar folk songs into Ksord-Akhtarian and rearranging them as rock ballads.

She got involved in politics because of her fear of the nationalist passions that were unleashed as the Communist dictatorship crumbled. She became terrified of the tribal mistrust that was driving her Ksordian and Tatar relatives apart. She was convinced that they could very well end up killing one another.

When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in December 1991, Ksordia-Akhtaria became independent, but it fell apart within months when Akhtaria broke away.

Fighting erupted, and a leading Communist persuaded Ruslan Shanidza to return to Ksordia-Akhtaria and use his popularity among both Ksords and Akhtarians to help bring the shooting to an end.

Ruslan was an ethnic Ksord and Ksordia-Akhtaria’s greatest sporting hero of all time. After his victory in the 1988 Olympics, he and his Akhtarian wife had allowed the Communists to use them as a symbol of interethnic unity. They toured Ksordia-Akhtaria, and huge crowds of adoring fans welcomed them everywhere they went.

In the spring of 1992, Ruslan and his Communist ally made a very different tour of the ethnically-mixed areas of southern Akhtaria, in an effort to halt the slide to civil war. Leila joined them, and for a brief while, it looked as if they might succeed until Mingrelsky, acting on Alavidza’s orders, led a death squad that shot Ruslan and very nearly killed him.

With him out of the way, the hawks on both sides got the war they wanted. It threatened to spill over into the multi-ethnic region of Central Kubania, which Ksords and Akhtarians shared with a large Tatar community. The Tatar leaders did their best to remain neutral, but as the war progressed, most Tatars became sympathetic to the Akhtarians, with the Onchi’Aketi massacre a decisive event that turned them against the Ksords. Encouraged by the Russians, the Tatar-led regional government decided to push for independence from Ksordia and called a referendum to ratify it.

Leila believed that an independent Central Kubania was unsustainable: the Ksords and Akhtarians would tear it apart, with the Tatars caught in the middle. She helped set up a campaign for a No vote in the independence referendum. But she knew it was a hopeless cause: Tatars and Akhtarians would vote for independence, and Ksords would boycott the referendum and refuse to recognise the result.

The only person who could give the No campaign any hope of victory was Ruslan, who was still in hospital eight months after the attempt on his life. He was a native of Central Kubania and his popularity extended to the Tatars. He had close friends among Tatar politicians and celebrities, and he was one of very few Ksords who could speak their language fluently.

In January 1993, Leila flew to Moscow and persuaded Ruslan to discharge himself from hospital and throw his weight behind the No campaign.

President Korgay and the Ksordian leadership treated his return as a joke. They didn’t think there was the slightest possibility that he could persuade many Ksords to vote at all, never mind get a majority of Tatars to vote to stay in a Ksordia that didn’t want them.

Everything changed 17 days before polling, when a member of Mingrelsky’s White Eagles shot Leila dead. Ruslan and his allies weaponised her death and used it to bring home to people the very real possibility that independence would trigger a devastating war.

The No campaign’s victory was a political earthquake. Everyone from Moscow to Ankara had taken it for granted that Central Kubania would vote for independence. Nobody had any idea what to do when the region voted by a small majority to reject it.

For his part, Ruslan said that peace in Central Kubania couldn’t last while Ksordia was ruled by Shakman Korgay, a man pathologically incapable of compromise with the leaders of other ethnic groups. He cobbled together a temporary peace deal with the Tatars and Akhtarians and then, with great fanfare, he moved to the Ksordian capital, calling on the fractured opposition to unite and bring Korgay down.

The official knocked and entered, carrying a silver tray with a coffee pot, two small expresso cups and a 50cl bottle of Krepkaya. He poured out two cups of strong, black coffee, opened the vodka bottle and handed it to Mingrelsky, who corrected his coffee until it was brim full. He passed the bottle to Alavidza, who did the same. The two men then toasted each other and downed their coffees in one. As they did so, the official disappeared, closing the door behind him.

‘So what are we going to do about our Tatar-loving friend?’ said Mingrelsky. ‘You know he’s already got fifteen political parties lined up against Korgay.’

‘Sixteen,’ Alavidza corrected him. ‘Dolgoruky’s just signed up. He’ll probably end up with about twenty.’

‘So what are we going to do?’

‘I tell you what you’re going to do about it,’ said Alavidza. ‘You’re going to sit on your backside and do nothing. Leave it to me and President Korgay. We’ll deal with him.’

Alavidza didn’t believe what he was saying. He was very worried that Korgay wouldn’t be able to deal with Shanidza at all. The President frequently made the mistake of believing his own propaganda. He thought the people would always love him because he had secured independence and seen off the ‘Rebel’ threat (like many Ksords, Alavidza always thought of Akhtarians as ‘Rebels’).

But Alavidza had seen the intelligence reports. He knew how many people really supported Korgay: perhaps 35%, or at most 40%. The rest blamed him for the hyperinflation that had wiped out their savings, the empty supermarket shelves, the queues in government shops, the power cuts, the widespread unemployment and the way the new bourgeoisie flaunted their wealth while everyone else found it harder and harder to feed their families.

And the intelligence reports made it plain that censoring the media made little difference. People could access Russian TV or the propaganda the Tatars spewed out from Central Kubania, and a lot of them thought Korgay was nothing but a crook, more interested in fattening his children than anything else.

This made Alavidza laugh. As if Korgay wasn’t doing what everyone in power had always done. Always had and always would. And all these self-righteous cretins who criticised Korgay, what about them? They included teachers who would put your children’s grades up for a packet of sausages. Doctors who wouldn’t look at you until they had seen what was in the goody bag you had brought them. Collective farm workers who sold agricultural machinery on the black market and then had the cheek to blame the government when their farm had no money to pay them.

What kept Korgay in power wasn’t the people’s love for him. It was the uselessness of the opposition. They hated each other more than they hated Korgay. They wouldn’t work with this one because he was a fascist or with that one because he used to be a Communist. They considered so-and-so a naked opportunist and such-and-such a pacifist traitor. And as for Korgay’s estranged ally who controlled West Ksordia, he was just a mini Korgay, and the others would have nothing to do with him.

Pathetic bunch of half dicks.

What the opposition had always lacked was a charismatic figure who could unite them. Someone with a proven track record of success and no ideological baggage that would stop him working with everyone else.

Until now.

Until Ruslan bloody Shanidza turned up.

Mingrelsky interrupted Alavidza’s thoughts. ‘We should just kill him and have done with it.’

Alavidza shook his head. ‘No. You’re not to touch him.’

‘Why the hell not?’

‘Because Korgay says no.’

‘You know the first people Shanidza will come after if he brings Korgay down?’ said Mingrelsky. ‘Fucking you and me.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’

‘So what are you going to do about it?’

‘I’m going to work with the President to make sure he fails. If we can do that without killing him, that’s what we’ll do. If we need to eliminate him, then we’ll do that.’

‘Okay,’ said Mingrelsky. ‘But let’s get one thing straight. When – not if, when – when you finally decide to get rid of him, he’s mine. Nobody else gets to take a pop at him. Only me.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

Mingrelsky shook his head. ‘No, you won’t bear it in mind; you’ll guarantee it. My fucking honour’s at stake. If anyone else kills him, I’ll be a laughing stock.’ He pointed at Alavidza. ‘You have to promise me, he’s mine.’

Alavidza nodded. ‘Okay. It’s a promise. If and when the time comes, you’ll have the honour.’

‘Good. Make sure Korgay knows too.’

‘I will. And if we give you a second chance, make sure you actually kill him this time.’

‘Don’t you worry about that.’

Chapter Three

RUSLAN woke up the instant his cell door opened. He had no idea how long he had been asleep. Was it hours or just a few minutes? He put his hand to his face to feel his stubble. It felt like two days’ growth and didn’t seem to have changed since they brought him back to his cell.

‘Come on then,’ said one of the guards.

Ruslan hated having to get out of his hard, metal-framed bed in front of them. He couldn’t sit up because of the damage the high-velocity bullet had done to his back muscles when it exited. He had to roll onto his front and swing his knees onto the tiled floor. Only then could he use his strong right arm to push himself upright and stand up.

‘Do you need to piss?’

He shook his head. His bladder felt empty, which seemed to confirm that he hadn’t been asleep for long. He was certainly shattered, as if they had removed a plug from his heel and drained all the energy from his body.

They took him along the dark corridor and up the stairs towards his interrogation room. He had no idea if it was day or night and was both parched and weak with hunger. His back ached from his hard bed and the fact that whenever they returned him to his cell, he was too exhausted to do the mobility exercises his physiotherapists had mandated.

He felt so alone, with nobody to support him, nobody to give him encouragement, nobody to offer even a shred of human kindness. Apart from the good cops, and he constantly had to remind himself that they weren’t being kind at all; they were just probing him for weaknesses.

He desperately missed Tamara. He tried not to let the Security Police see how much fear for her and Shota’s safety consumed him. Some interrogators spoke as if they had her in their clutches, and that evil cockroach with the bushy eyebrows liked to say that Vakhtan Mingrelsky was itching to invite her for a gang bang with his boys.

Two plainclothes officers were waiting for him in his dingy interrogation room. Ruslan thought of them as Captain Fat Git and his sidekick Lieutenant Adenoids.

They had a TV and video recorder on a trolley behind them.

‘Oh, hello,’ said Ruslan. ‘Are you planning to show me a movie?’

‘You just sit down,’ said Captain Fat Git. ‘We’ll ask the questions.’

Ruslan sat and braced himself. The next few hours were going to be very difficult.

‘So,’ said Captain Fat Git, ‘tell us about the time you caught your wife smoking marijuana.’

How the hell did they know about that?

Ruslan took a deep breath to clear his head. Never mind about that, he told himself. Fight back.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Tell us about the time you caught your wife smoking marijuana.’

‘Yes, I heard that. But aren’t you forgetting something?’

They had spent hour after hour browbeating Ruslan, trying to make him give them his surname. Four lengthy interrogation sessions with three lead interrogators, plus two different good cops assuring him that everything would be all right if he just co-operated a little.

And now they had given up.

This was his first victory over them.

He turned towards what he assumed was a two-way mirror on his right and grinned. ‘These idiots don’t know proper procedure,’ he said. ‘They’re not supposed to ask me any questions until I’ve told them my surname.’

A month before Ruslan’s arrest, in what she would soon look back on as a time of happy innocence, Tamara had been surprised how much she was enjoying the role of politician’s wife. To her relief, this hadn’t yet involved public appearances. It was more a question of entertaining allies Ruslan needed to bond with: politicians, newspaper editors and workers’ and student leaders. That night’s guests, however, weren’t allies. They were a colonel and his wife.

Back then, when it came to her family’s everyday meals, Tamara insisted on doing all the shopping and cooking herself. But when she was entertaining, she would send Ruslan’s staff to scour the half-empty markets and supermarkets of Ronkoni for the best ingredients, and a bodyguard who had once worked as a sous chef would help with the cooking.

For the colonel, they were preparing a starter of aubergine slices stuffed with crushed walnuts. The main course would be tender beef ostri served with hot khachapuri cheese bread, with honey and nut gozinaki biscuits for dessert. A 20-minute power cut had disrupted preparations but they had managed to catch up.

Ruslan had told Tamara that her job was to charm their guests. That was fine with her. She liked having an excuse to put on her finest along with her best jewellery, some lipstick and a touch of mascara.

Though she worried that she looked older than her 31 years (the last 12 months had been very difficult, after all), Tamara knew she still had her good looks. She liked the way her pale complexion set off her black hair and knew full well the effect her petite figure and angular features had on men.

If her male guests would be easy enough to charm, she was acutely aware that she mustn’t alienate their wives. She made sure her clothes could never be accused of being ‘slutty’ and she always complimented them on their hair or their clothes, perfume or jewellery.

And she never ever flirted with their husbands, even though quite a few wives flirted with hers. Now in his mid-30s, Ruslan was starting to look fit and healthy again, despite his injuries. He was tall, with short, dark hair, and Tamara loved the kindness and good humour that still shone from his deep brown eyes, even after all the horrors he had been through. He was no longer as tanned as he had been when he was a marathon runner, and he had recently put on a little weight. He wasn’t pleased about that, but she thought it made him look even more handsome.

Tamara glanced at her watch. It was time to leave the kitchen to her bodyguard-cum-sous chef and dress for dinner. She went into the living room, where Ruslan was on the sofa, playing rough and tumble with Shota.

‘It’s nearly six.’

‘Okay.’

‘Hey, little poppet, are you going to come upstairs with Mama and Papa?’

‘I fighting Papa.’

‘I can see that, but it’s time for Mama and Papa to get dressed.’

‘You already dressed.’

Ruslan and Tamara laughed.

‘Yes, we are. But we’ve got to put our best clothes on. A colonel’s coming for dinner.’

‘What’s a colonel?’

Ruslan’s fractious coalition by now included 22 political parties, which ranged from militant right-wing nationalists to former Communists and radical left-wing democrats. The only thing that united them was a shared loathing of Ksordia’s strongman ruler and a desire to take advantage of the opportunity Ruslan’s arrival had given them to bring him down.

Korgay was a former wrestler who had been a leading member of the Communist regime in the last decades of Soviet rule. As the Soviet Union started to crumble, he saw which way the wind was blowing and reinvented himself, first as a Communist reformer and then as a hard-line nationalist.

If he had briefly championed reform, once in power, Korgay put democratisation into reverse. His henchman Tengiz Alavidza reconstituted the old KGB into a secret police force loyal to him, which set about reactivating the KGB’s old networks of informants.

Korgay’s government reimposed censorship on the media, hounding recalcitrant proprietors and reporters with court cases and the threat of detention. The regime became increasingly lawless, allying itself with fascistic paramilitary groups closely connected to organised crime. These groups would periodically send thugs to disrupt opposition meetings, and every leading anti-Korgay activist lived with the knowledge that they might at any time find themselves bundled into a car, driven to a remote location and beaten up.

As the economy continued to collapse, Korgay’s corruption became ever more blatant. Opponents nicknamed him ‘Mr Ten Percent’ because he routinely demanded a bribe of 10% of the value of any contract made with a government body.

His aggressive handling of interethnic relations helped set off the ruinous war against Akhtaria. In seven months of fighting, more than 10,000 had died and a quarter of a million had been driven from their homes. Many believed that it was only Ruslan’s intervention that had prevented an even more calamitous war in Central Kubania, where the Ksords would have confronted a coalition of Tatars and Akhtarians that was backed by Russia.

As Ruslan and Tamara dressed for dinner, six kilometres away in the Presidential Palace, Korgay was greeting his inner circle in a grand reception room on the top floor. The ritual of four kisses all round took some time, but eventually everyone sat down and a waiter handed out glasses of Georgian red wine.

Korgay was a burly figure in his late fifties, his hair dyed black and swept back. His was a face seen all over Ksordia, on posters with the country’s dull white, blue and green triband flag and the Cyrillic letters ‘KTKT’ (Ksordia twaksa Korgaytan tad – Ksordia united with Korgay), the favourite slogan of the vast crowds that had brought him to power just four years earlier.

As well as Tengiz Alavidza, Korgay’s inner circle included two senior members of his Socialist Party, an ultranationalist party leader and Colonel Maksi Machabeli, the commander of the Ksordian Special Forces. Machabeli, who liked to wear his combat uniform, was a powerful figure in his early fifties, bald on top with the rest of his grey hair clipped short.

Korgay surveyed his advisors as they took their glasses. Most seemed relaxed enough, but Alavidza had a harried look about him. He was obviously afraid that Shanidza would extract revenge for the attempt on his life.

He needed to find a way to soothe Alavidza’s fears, to show him that he was in control and there was no need to set Vakhtan Mingrelsky on Shanidza again. That would be just about the worst thing they could do at the moment. Just stay calm and wait for the opposition to fall apart. That was all they had to do.

Once the waiter had made himself scarce, Korgay proposed a toast.

‘To Ruslan Shanidza, may his coalition somehow manage not to implode for a couple more weeks.’

Everyone except Alavidza laughed. They all raised their glasses.

‘So,’ said Korgay, turning to Alavidza, ‘what’s our friend Mr Shanidza up to?’

‘Wining and dining his new allies,’ said Alavidza. ‘Turns out his Rebel vixen’s a good cook.’

‘So who’s he had round?’

‘Well, among the party leaders, all the big ones: Kakhi, Orbeliani, Nina Begishveli and Dolgoruky.’

‘Not Lionidza?’

‘He’s been round twice, but not for dinner.’

‘Did he meet them together or separately?’

‘Separately, of course.’

Ksordia didn’t yet have a proper system of political parties. Most parties in the ‘Together’ opposition were simply vehicles for a single politician. They were nicknamed ‘van parties’ on the grounds that all the members could fit into a single van. Only five opposition parties fell outside this category, and Shanidza and his wife had been entertaining their leaders.

‘What do they talk about?’ asked Korgay. ‘Can your people hear what they say?’

‘Yes and no,’ said Alavidza. ‘Shanidza starts off by warning them that the house may be bugged, so they have to be careful. When they have dinner, it’s mostly small talk. After Shanidza’s wife puts their son to bed, they go out into the garden where we can’t hear them. His wife stays behind and we have to listen to her chatting up the party leaders’ wives.’

‘Does she say anything of interest?’

‘She puts music on so it’s often difficult to make out what they’re saying. But she told Kakhi’s wife that she has nightmares about Vakhtan Mingrelsky. She dreams he comes to their house to kill Shanidza and she’s the only one that can stop him.’

Korgay burst out laughing. ‘Well, you never know,’ he said. ‘If we ever get desperate, maybe we can find a way to make her dream come true.’

They all laughed, with the exception of Colonel Machabeli, who glared at Alavidza.

‘And how do they all get on?’ Korgay asked.

‘My boys tell me it’s all very jolly.’

‘What about Nina Begishveli?’ (Nina, the leader of the radical democrats, had once been Shanidza’s lover.)

‘Apparently, that was the jolliest evening of the lot.’

‘What? Did she get on with his wife?’

‘So I’m told.’

‘It’s quite a sensible strategy,’ said Machabeli. ‘He’s trying to bond with them on a personal level. Presumably he thinks that’ll help him when his coalition starts to fracture.’

Korgay shook his head. ‘It won’t work. Shanidza’s peaked too soon. There’s no way he can keep that rabble together until the November election.’

Alavidza smiled. Korgay was glad to see him smile but then realised there was something malevolent about it.

‘Guess who he’s got coming for dinner tonight.’

‘Who?’

Alavidza turned to face Colonel Machabeli. ‘Your cousin.’

‘What?’ Machabeli was clearly shocked. ‘You mean Vizirov?’

‘Yes.’

‘God’s bollocks. What’s he doing there?’

‘Good question,’ said Korgay. ‘Does the General know?’

‘It seems that he okayed it.’

‘Blood and damnation,’ said Korgay. ‘I want a full report first thing tomorrow.

Chapter Four

THIS time, they gave Ruslan something to eat after they woke him up: cold, stale khachapuri cheese bread with a plastic cup of lukewarm tea. He ate as slowly as he could as he psyched himself up for his next interrogation. The last session had been a score draw. He had enjoyed his little victory over his name and had extracted maximum value from it.

But Captain Fat Git and Lieutenant Adenoids had drawn blood too. They had showed him a video of