‘There must be room for more outside energy investment.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘What tech exactly do you do for the oil industry?’

He kept his eyes on the dancefloor as if the question was mildly distasteful.

‘Collect data and process it. Data from magic technology.’

‘Satellites?’

‘Satellites, drones. Sometimes even guys on the ground.’

‘For Chevron?’

He smiled. ‘Not a bad guess. I’m with one of the littler guys though. Saracen. Know them?’

‘They’re in Vietnam, right?’

‘They’ve got fields in ’Nam, Mexico. They buy them up, flip them, sell them to the majors for a quick profit. But Kazakhstan’s got under their skin.’

‘Should I invest in Saracen?’

He hesitated, the smile on his face turning more enigmatic.

‘You could do worse,’ he said. Then he shook his head ruefully. ‘Seriously, I’d be killed for talking about this stuff.’

‘Really?’

‘High stakes. And not the most gentle crowd.’

‘People get hurt?’

‘Can do. Will do, no doubt. Why?’

‘Just feeling out the landscape.’

‘Well, let me tell you: you’re going to need a stomach for risk doing any business around here.’

‘This place has plenty of oil still to come, right?’

‘Sure, oil’s oil. But times are changing. The President’s not going to live for ever. He’s walked a fine line: tight with Russia, but giving us crumbs – oil crumbs, investment crumbs. That arrangement’s not going to last for ever. He’s, what, getting on for eighty? There’s no succession plan. He’s kept it that way deliberately.’

‘Where do you think the trouble will come from? Islamists?’

Bryant laughed. ‘These guys wouldn’t know a Koran from a JC Penney catalogue. The trouble will come from the big guys next door.’ He tilted his bottle. ‘China, Russia.’

‘A guy I met yesterday was talking about container traffic from China being on the up.’

‘Doubled last year. Only danger is the Chinese don’t know when to stop. They’re buying agricultural land, housing, you name it. People aren’t happy.’

‘Better than Russians getting it?’

‘They like the Russians here. There’s an old Kazakh proverb: “To be the captive of the Chinese is a tight noose — with the Russians, it is a wide, open road.”’

‘Sounds like a Russian proverb,’ I said.

‘Every country needs protection. You have the US. No one wants to be independent without being strong. Anyway, the Kazakhs aren’t so worried about infrastructure. They don’t like losing land.’

‘They’ve got enough of it.’

‘But it’s how they identify. You’ve got to understand psychology. There’s so much of it, it’s everything. That’s Kazakhstan.’

Another girl came over and he started chatting to her. She looked Indonesian. I went to the toilets where there was crushed ice in the urinals and a guy wearing a tuxedo rapping Kazakh into his phone. The escort had gone when I returned and Bryant was staring into space.