There were a few similarities between Rykov and the rest of the poet’s audience. He was young, and well fed enough to know that some people in communist Russia were more equal than others. But he didn’t share the shame they felt over their relatively comfortable lives, because he knew better than most how the Soviet system really worked—including the crucial role clandestine midnight events like this one played.

Officially Russia didn’t have a bourgeoisie, but Rykov was currently looking out over its heads. For as long as civilisation had existed, those who wanted power had spent their lives fretting and pandering to the people at the top and bottom of society. But Rykov understood that every political system was built, sustained, or crippled by the middle classes. They also needed pandering to, but in a different, more subtle way. They wanted to feel that they had a part to play. They needed to believe their opinions, thoughts, and feelings meant something. But they never wanted to actually act on them. They wanted to rebel, but only a little, and without ever putting themselves in any real danger.

This gathering was literally and figuratively underground. It could be raided at any moment, and everyone carted off for a night in a cell or a slap on the wrist. But it wouldn’t be. Because the more intelligent minds in the Party understood that while Russia’s diffident middle classes were huddling in scattered basements congratulating each other about the illicit thrill of listening to an old drunk’s musings, they weren’t doing something more dangerous. It was better to keep them in the dark than drive them out into the open where they might realise just how many of them there were.

And, if for some stupid reason someone did decide to storm the cellar, at least one person in the crowd wouldn’t be arrested. That person was Vadim Rykov, because he was a KGB officer. But he wasn’t just any officer, he was a major and the head of Line Z, one of the Russian security service’s most secret and feared divisions.

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Bennett sat drinking for hours until Doralis decided she’d had enough.

‘You’ve done your wallowing, girl,’ she said as she took Bennett’s empty glass from her. ‘Now go get some sleep.’

‘Sure,’ Bennett replied, her voice a little slurred from the steady stream of rum she’d been given. ‘G’night, Doralis.’

She left some peso notes on the counter to cover her tab and left the bar, scratching her short hair as she stepped back out into the night, as if that would help dislodge all the thoughts clogging up her brain.

Bennett had spent her evening going over not just the events of the last twenty-four hours but the whole of the last five years.