.

tags to guide you to associated general information. It’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it.’

      Sladek ran the London branch of Almatinvest from a rented office in the Hyde Park Business Centre. The head office was based in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He lived alone in a first-floor, one-bedroom flat in Cadogan Square and drove a silver Mercedes Kompressor. Since his arrival in Britain two years before, his life had been a picture of propriety. Before that, however, he’d been a financial cowboy in the Wild East, pioneering new forms of banking in places where livestock was still the predominant currency. As a thirty-year-old, he’d run a small private bank named Vassex in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Rosie went to one of the associated topics. A picture of snow-capped peaks formed on the central screen.

      ‘This is the Tian Shan which straddles China and Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan is a tiny, mountainous country which, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, has become a sort of CIS version of Switzerland for those whose banking arrangements run to the unorthodox. Sladek spent four years in Bishkek before Vassex went into liquidation, along with three of its founders. The following year, he turned up in Moscow.’

      She pressed another of the squares to her right. It was some film footage: a large room with a raised dais at one end and rows of chairs for an audience in front of it. Behind the dais, two large screens displayed rows of numbers beneath Cyrillic headings. Rosie pointed to a man in a double-breasted suit in the fourth row. ‘That’s Sladek.’

      ‘What’s this?’

      ‘A Moscow currency auction, usually held in hotels – like this one – or in a conference hall, generally for between twenty and fifty people.’

      Stephanie watched the silent movie. ‘What are they doing?’

      ‘They’re bidding for dollars that the Central State Bank offers as lines of credit. They pay over the odds for the cash because they know they’ll make a profit on the interest they’ll charge when they lend the dollars to business ventures. It’s a carve-up, naturally. Strictly invitation only.’

      ‘How was Sladek involved?’

      ‘This auction was back in 1997. He was buying on behalf of Ivan Timofeyev, a mobster-turned-banker. Timofeyev was persona non grata at these events but that didn’t prevent him from sending his representatives. Or from being decapitated by Siberian bandits in Krasnoyarsk last October.’

      ‘But these days, Sladek’s clean, right?’

      Rosie smiled. ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. But compared to some of the other companies he’s worked for, Almatinvest is a picture of respectability.’

      ‘Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan are neighbours, aren’t they? Is there any connection with what he does now and what he did then?’

      ‘It’s true that Bishkek and Almaty are stranded together in the middle of nowhere. A lot of the money from Kazak and Azerbaijani oil fields has passed through institutions in Bishkek and a lot of Almatinvest’s commercial partners and clients are in the oil industry. Then there’s this …’

      Another square, another image. A picture of Zbigniew Sladek shaking hands with Murtaza Rakhimov, president of Bashkortostan, one of the eighty-nine members of the Russian Federation. Rakhimov and his immediate family had come to regard oil-rich Bashkortostan as a private fiefdom; Ural, the president’s son, ran one of Russia’s largest oil companies. The file listed examples of their autocratic rule, of brutality, corruption, cronyism, media control, governmental fraud.

      ‘Once you start to follow the leads,’ Rosie said, ‘you find yourself being dragged through Dagestan, Tatarstan, Chechnya, St Petersburg, the Baltic States and into western Europe. By the way, these are for you.’

      She handed Stephanie a small plastic box. Stephanie removed the lid. Inside, there were embossed business cards: Katherine March, Galileo Resources. At the bottom of each card there was a phone number, a fax number and an e-mail address. But no physical address.

      ‘When you go to see Sladek, this is who you’ll be. In conversation, you’re Kate, not Katherine. The identity isn’t complete yet but the numbers and the e-mail address are established. We’ve removed Galileo Resources from the listed companies as a precaution. This should be enough to get you past Sladek but we’ll give you a little leverage, just to make sure. We’ll have the rest of the Kate March identity in place before you meet Komarov.’