He took me to a Ramstor all-night supermarket. I found a coat on the rails and put it on and crouched in a corner, warming my hands. My phone rang. I couldn’t move my fingers. Eventually I managed to answer the phone by putting it on the ground and using my knuckles. It was Piper in a state of high anxiety.

‘You’re alive. Jesus Christ. Where are you?’

‘A supermarket. What do you know?’

‘Nothing. I’m in a car somewhere around the Northern Lights complex. We’ve been stopped at a roadblock. We’re trying to get to the Saracen offices. It’s just … It’s going to be a holding situation. Until we know how this is going to play out.’

‘Nothing’s going to hold.’

‘No.’

‘They’ll try to pin this on us,’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘Who’s alive?’

‘The President’s critical. He’s at City Hospital Number One. Galina’s also at the hospital. She might be okay.’

‘This is fucked. How did they drive up to the hotel?’

The line went. I checked social media for IMK, Twitter feeds for Al-Nusra, ISIS in Central Asia, Hizb ut-Tahrir: no one claiming credit for the attack.

The art of an assassination is controlling what happens next. That’s not the sole prerogative of those responsible; they’ve just got a head start. On Russian media they were cutting between footage from Astana and a story about a GL5 maritime patrol vessel caught illegally patrolling in the Caspian: In the last five or six hours a Russian coast guard patrol rammed and water-cannoned a boat belonging to a UK-registered private security company – a 183-foot vessel with a crew of 14 and a helicopter pad. The contractors had been arrested; they showed men in GL5 uniform sitting on the ground, hands on their heads like drug runners.

All domestic flights were grounded. The first ‘convenient for Saracen’ posts had appeared less than twenty minutes after the attack. Oil was up five points, FTSE closing just as Saracen started to lift.

I saw a store security guard watching me from the end of the aisle, speaking to two men in GL5 uniforms, then realised they were talking about me. The contractors walked over.

‘We’ve been instructed to get you somewhere safe,’ one of them said.

‘Where would that be?’

‘Everyone’s convening at the Saracen headquarters. We may have to get out of the country.’ He sounded Australian. I said I’d make my own way. They were having none of it. We went out to where a Nissan 4×4 was waiting.

The guards were silent as we drove, eerily calm behind their shades, the man in the passenger seat cradling a semi-automatic. He looked South East Asian. Inside the vehicle were steel lock boxes for weapons, medibags, an axe affixed to the back of the driver’s seat. There were chemsuits and atropine autoinjectors: antidote for nerve agents.