I felt their shock. You think you’re protected because something special is happening. And there are hundreds of you, standing side by side: people who’ve never fucked with power before and can’t imagine that it’s as desperate as they are.

It was online for around ten minutes, then disappeared. I had three missed calls from Piper.

‘Nine, ten dead,’ she said, when I eventually got through. ‘Confirmed. A lot critical.’

‘Who opened fire? Police? Military?’

‘No idea.’

‘Where was the President?’

‘We think he was stuck on the runway. Maybe weather. Maybe sabotaged.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘It’s localised. It’s a local dispute that got out of hand. That’s how we’re framing it.’

‘You can go further. Make it about elements in the Kazakh government close to Russia. Connect it to Zhaparov.’

Piper sighed.

‘Say there’s stuff under the surface; people investigating him. The President’s an experienced dictator; he hates mess. This is an opportunity to move Zhaparov out of power once and for all.’

‘We can’t afford to inflame things.’

‘It’s not going to blow over.’

‘If you’ve got ideas of what we might get out there, send them my way.’

I drove into the centre. Khan Shatyr was open. I headed past Tiffany and Hugo Boss up to the food court, the Kyoto Bar, where I ordered an overpriced Japanese whisky. Screens in the café showed sport. It looked like Semey had gone blackout. The staff were watching their phones. I found a number for a couple of businesses there, hotels and restaurants, dialled them and the line didn’t connect.

Joanna had talked me through the principles of psyops: the essential ingredients of a political scandal are that it should be shocking and not immediately refutable. The best lies are built on truth. All you had to do was make people look; things came apart by themselves.

I had a platform. Piper’s team had been hard at work. Raiymbek now existed – complete with a picture of himself on horseback with spear and helmet. He worked Twitter hard, posting almost hourly in Kazakh, Russian and English. The content was eclectic, ranging from footage of Russians abusing a Kazakh prostitute, to repeated links to a blog called Kazakh Independence, which had been up three hours and already boasted 800 subscribers. Its first post, on the Bolshevik invasion of Kazakhstan and its atrocities, had been shared more than 120 times.

I lifted an image of one of Zhaparov’s elite anti-terrorist troops and identified them as the men firing at protesters, emailed it to Lucy Piper and suggested Raiymbek might circulate the idea that the shooting was on Zhaparov’s direct orders.

‘Use the phrase “Putin’s puppet”.’

Piper approved. I called a freelance journalist contact, one who was always keen for tips, less keen on fact-checking, and got pieces fast onto a reputable site that frequently fed into the national press.

‘Want an angle on this shooting in Kazakhstan?’