There was more applause as he finished, then a toast to Galina, the birthday girl. I watched the Russians to see if they toasted and they did so unreservedly, downing the Veuve Clicquot. The President himself moved away from the stage and everyone went back to their previous conversations.

Bryant was talking to the Chinese. The Head of Extraction for the Italian oil firm Agip was nearby, sharing something on his phone with the man who ran the central bank. But no one was conspicuously hustling. The mood was carefree. Outside, snow thickened in the air, to the extent that I wondered if we were all going to become trapped, and how that would pan out. But for now all were drunk and we could stop pretending that power was anything other than ridiculous good fortune. Almost 11 p.m. and there was the lightheaded hilarity of getting away with it.

Anastasia checked a silver iPhone then dropped it in her bag. She transferred her gaze to the room. Bryant caught my eye and winked. The man at the bar saw this, checked Bryant, turned back to the mirror. He had tan lines from wraparound sunglasses.

None of this was how I’d manage an assassination.

‘I bet, when you were studying, you did not want to interpret for these people,’ I said. ‘You wanted to translate literature.’

Anastasia glanced across the crowd. ‘Yes.’ She conceded this in a tone of inevitability. ‘But there is no security in that. Here, that is what people care about. My family need me to earn money.’

‘A country only truly develops when people stop caring about their family,’ I said. ‘That is what developed means.’

She raised an eyebrow, considering this.

‘Come with me,’ I said. I took her hand and helped her up, leading her to the windows. ‘I also like languages,’ I said. ‘Did you know, the Germans call this Lichtarchitektur: the architecture of light.’

Glass towers shimmered. A block away, on the side of the KazInvest offices, a pale-skinned woman twenty floors high repeatedly lifted a Samsung 7 to her ear and smiled. Her face lit the canvas roofs of three troop carriers parked beside the building. I lifted my phone and took a photo of the skyline.

‘And one of us,’ I said.

She stiffened. ‘I hate photos.’

‘Come on, something to make my friends in London jealous.’ Anastasia rolled her eyes, but flicked her hair away from her face compliantly and leaned in. ‘So many photographs,’ she muttered.

In the bathroom, I locked a stall and put the image through facial recognition. Four separate names came up, three nationalities. I thought of the message Stefan had picked up: Catalyst will be at the party. It was time to get out of here.

I passed Galina in the corridor on my way back, Lucy Piper adjusting the zip on the back of her blue Versace cocktail dress.