I took cash, an amount that would be a couple of months’ salary for Shomko, split it between two envelopes taken from reception. I went back to the Mega Astana and bought a hunting knife, strapping it to my calf with a tubular bandage. Then I made a call to a friend who worked for GL5.

There was every chance Shomko would take the money and arrest me, and I’d had enough of that for one day. According to Elena Yussopova’s research, GL5 private security were plentiful and up for all sorts. The morning’s events had been a wake-up call in more ways than one. I needed backup and I needed options for getting out of Kazakhstan fast and inconspicuously.

I knew GL5 all too well, had people I’d consider friends working for the company, had had my life both saved and endangered by them. At this stage in earth’s history, it was hard not to encounter GL5. The GL stood for Global Logistics; the 5 was supposedly the five continents on which they operated, which counted Eurasia as one and suggested they weren’t on Antarctica, about which I was sceptical. Most recently I’d helped negotiate two months’ work for them in the Saudi desert training Syrian rebels. We’d crossed paths regularly since Libya, when they were the first security company to establish a presence post-revolution. They protected the British Embassy and so, to an extent, myself. Among intelligence officers, their base in Tripoli, behind Martyrs’ Square, was known as a place to get a beer and a game of pool. Open the windows and you could smell the Mediterranean through the security mesh.

I called Jim Baillie, a former captain in the Parachute Regiment, now running GL5’s cash transportation wing.

‘Got anyone I can speak to about your Kazakh team? I need a hand.’

There was a pause.

‘Trouble?’ Baillie said.

‘Not yet. Could do with a couple of bodies this afternoon though.’

I heard him exhale.

‘Geoff Purvis is in Astana. He’s a good lad, former Welsh Guards. I can make a call.’

Purvis himself called me twenty minutes later. He listened to my request.

‘Reckon I might be able to help. Obviously there’ll be a price attached.’

‘I understand that.’

He asked if I could come to their base, which was in the grounds of the Saracen HQ. I said I’d be happy to pay a visit.

Saracen had taken over a sprawling former Gazprom compound on the eastern edge of Astana, with a helipad used for flying execs into town and geologists out to the drill sites. Purvis met me at the gates. He was tall, fair hair receded to a reserve line halfway back across his scalp, face flushed with what, up close, you saw were spider veins. His trousers were bloused into desert boots, paratrooper style. He gripped my hand and shook.

‘So you’re a mate of Jim’s?’