Kompromat

But with Craig standing proud and manly before him, haloed in a swirl of feral testosterone, Barnard could see how charismatic he might be to a certain type of voter.

But how had Craig found the time to come to St Petersburg? Barnard found himself wondering a few minutes later, once the aura of the powerful man had dropped a notch or two. What kind of business did he have with President Popov that was important enough for him to take a break from campaigning at this crucial stage?

Twenty minutes later, Barnard headed for the lift. He felt decidedly woozy. Don’t mix the grain and the grape, his father had always told him. Well, he’d had a lot of wine at the dinner, and several large tots of whisky sitting there in the Kempinski Bar. They were heading for the airport early the next morning for the long flight to Russia’s Far East. He hoped to hell his head had cleared by then.

Two young and glamorous Russian women dressed to the nines and wafting clouds of expensive perfume drifted across the hotel foyer to join him as he waited for the lift.

Barnard had noticed them earlier, sitting at a neighbouring table in the bar.

‘Good evening, ladies,’ Barnard said in what he hoped was a debonair manner. ‘Going up too? I’m heading for the eighth floor.’

The two Russian women allowed their lips to curve into what – in this dim light – might almost pass for a smile. ‘Eighth floor. Yes, that is good floor for us too,’ they purred.

‘All aboard then,’ Barnard hiccoughed as the doors opened. ‘Eighth it is!’

CHAPTER THREE

One of the reasons – indeed possibly the principal reason – Jack Varese had bought the Gulfstream 550 was that he liked to fly it himself. It wasn’t just a question of keeping up his flying hours, though with the hectic schedule he led that was always a consideration.

What he loved above all was being alone with his thoughts. Okay, his was one of the world’s most famous faces. Quite apart from his latest Oscar, he had starred in a score of movies that had been box-office successes. Women threw themselves at him. Over the years the glamour magazines had speculated about the possible outcome of the many ‘relationships’ with beautiful women that Varese had had pursued, but none of them, so far as the Hollywood gossip-mill knew, had come to anything.

The truth of the matter was that Varese liked to keep his private life private. Was he looking for a soulmate? Someone who, like him, believed that the world’s wild places needed to be preserved? If he was, he wasn’t saying, not even to himself.

On that particular late April morning, as the Gulfstream 550 took off from St Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport, Jack Varese was looking forward to some uninterrupted ‘quality time’ at the controls. In fact, since the distance, airport to airport, between St Petersburg and Khabarovsk in Russia’s Far East was around 4,000 miles, and since the Gulfstream 550 could cruise comfortably at 40,000 feet at around 600 mph, Varese reckoned that he had at least seven hours ahead of him to reflect on the state of Planet Earth.

And they wouldn’t have to refuel. The Gulfstream 550 had a range of 6,700 nautical miles. Hell, Varese thought, if the airport at Khabarovsk was closed in by fog or snow or by storm conditions, as it sometimes was apparently, they would have easily enough fuel to head for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky or even Vladivostok.

As it happened, the weather that morning was perfect. Sometimes when you are flying at 40,000 ft. all Varese could see were the clouds below, but the control tower at Pulkova gave the forecast as they cleared the plane for take-off.

‘You’ve got good weather all the way to Khabarovsk, Mr Varese,’ the tower said.

As he taxied to the end of the runway Varese noted that the Russian presidential plane, an Ilyushin Il-96, and Russia’s own equivalent of Air Force One, was still parked on the tarmac, surrounded by armed guards. There was a bowser next to the plane. It looked as though they had just finished refuelling. Was President Popov still in St Petersburg? Was he about to depart? If so, where was he heading? Moscow? Somewhere else? Did the presidential plane have to file a flight plan? And if someone did file a flight plan, would anyone seriously believe them?

Nowadays, Varese reflected, there was no way of telling what was true and what was false. There were facts and there were ‘alternative facts’. Take your pick. In fact, he was often amazed at what was reported about himself, always with the ‘collaboration’ of a mysterious ‘friend’ or ‘close confidante’. Apparently, so Varese had heard, the Russians had whole cities out there somewhere in the tundra inventing stories, which they then leaked to the media, or somehow planted in the Twittersphere. Black could quite literally become white, and sometimes without even any intervening shades of grey.