He’d slept well, Korolev was already making his way back to the far side of the Urals, and he could enjoy his morning walk to the Lubyanka in peace. He strolled down Bolshaya Nikitskaya ul., and across Alexandrovsky Garden and Red Square, watching the city come to life around him in peace. Babushkas hurried their grandchildren to school, and the street sweepers went through their daily ritual of cleaning the pavements outside old pastel-stuccoed villas as the bright summer sun rose over the spires of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Like every other day, Medev reached his cavernous office at ten minutes to nine, and brewed himself a sour cherry and honey tea. Six five-metre-high windows flooded the room with light during the day, and a row of large, orb-shaped pendants hanging from the ceiling did the same at night. The room was far too large for one man in Medev’s opinion, but he knew its size was intended to reflect the power and importance of his position rather than Medev himself.

He sat at his desk, surrounded on all four sides by three metres of meticulously maintained parquet flooring, savouring his favourite drink and toying with the set of figurines he kept next to his blotting pad. The small figures were abstract human shapes, fashioned in clay by Kazimir Malevich, the great Modernist artist who had been lauded by Lenin and then derided by Stalin.

Medev loved the figures for their myriad contradictions. They were anonymous, homogenous, each without a face and all of them made up of the same basic shapes. But they bore such unique markings and indentations from Malevich’s tools that they were all completely individual. The same but different, different but the same.

No one knew if Khrushchev admired Modernism, and few officers would have risked displaying something so provocative as Malevich’s figures in case they were not to his taste. But Medev reasoned that the leader of the Soviet Union probably had more important things to worry about than this. If Medev was going to find himself bundled onto the back seat of a car and driven out to Khimki Forest, it wouldn’t be for a minor artistic indulgence.

At exactly nine o’clock there was a knock at Medev’s door. Medev’s assistant, Lieutenant Vadim Rykov, had arrived for his morning briefing. Rykov was barely into his twenties but he’d worked for Medev for almost two years and was well trained in his boss’s preferred working methods. So, as ever, he got the incidentals out of the way before the day’s big stories.